Chrome browser will allow one-click disabling of unwanted extensions

Chrome users have the largest collection of extensions available, but not all are safe to use and many can cause web pages to display incorrectly.

Introduced with the aim of extending basic functionality and improving the browsing experience, extensions attached to the Chrome browser can also have many adverse effects, which tend to increase in proportion to the number of extensions active at once. For example, certain sites may be blocked from displaying when AdBlock extensions are detected, while other extensions may cause certain menus to not work or page elements to be missing. There are also extensions which, while useful, come with considerable security risks through the access permissions required on installation. But manually disabling Chrome extensions every time we want to access homebanking sites or other accounts with access to sensitive data is not a convenient solution, with most users wavering between using only those absolutely essential extensions or ignoring it altogether.

Recognizing this problem, Google is preparing to add a new on/off button to the Extensions menu already present in the Chrome interface, allowing one-click disabling of all active extensions. It’s unclear at the moment whether checking this option will only have an effect for the active tab, or for all open tabs. What we can say for sure is that according to the current implementation of Chrome extension support, any changes made by checking/unchecking extensions require reloading Chrome tabs.

Interestingly, Microsoft has implemented a similar feature for the Edge browser as early as April 2022. Called “Pause extensions on this site” which allows you to selectively disable extensions for the current tab only.