Bug: chrome://flags/#enable-fast-user-switching is gone and #enable-new-profile-management is ignoring the disabled setting

[SK]

Hi

The lastest auto update seems to have some bugs relating to profile switching,

1. The #enable-new-profile-management is being ignored. 

Even though I have this set to disabled. The new profile management insists on being active.

2. #enable-fast-user-switching is missing from flags

3. Enable the new avatar menu is missing from flags. 

There are several posts and complaints online about why the new profile management is a completed step backwards in terms of useability and how it disables the useability and visibility of different browser instances (aka users). 

Further its use of a "name" on the tab bar is both visually useless, but wastes valuable tab space. While an avatar, as was the case, is instantly recognisable by a human brain and uses far less tab bar space. 

The fast switching lets you change or load a user instantly. The new profile system makes it many clicks through annoyances to get to a new user.

Here are some the links which now appear broken in the latest release for some reason: 

http://lifehacker.com/how-to-disable-chromes-new-user-menu-1679224275

http://digiwonk.wonderhowto.com/how-to/get-back-avatars-chrome-switch-user-profiles-more-easily-0159605/

Does anyone know if there is a way to restore this functionality in the "new" release? 

Thanks and regards,

[Dario Dorando]

Autoupdate of what?
Chromium or Chrome PC/Phone
Which Channel if Chrome PC/Phone?

--
--
Chromium Discussion mailing list: chromium...@chromium.org
View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-discuss

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to chromium-discu...@chromium.org.

[Stephen Kervin]

Version 44.0.2403.89 (64-bit)

OSX 10.10.4

[Anthony Vallee-dubois]

Hi Stephen,

First of all, just a reminder that this mailing list isn't meant for bug reports. However, this is working as intended so I won't ask you to file a bug instead.

The #enable-new-profile-management flag is still honored but it's an aggregating flag in that it toggles a bunch of things. One of those used to be the #new-avatar-menu flag, which is now removed as of M44, so that's why the button and the menu are still there regardless of #enable-new-profile-management state.

With regards to #enable-fast-user-switching: we agree that going through the User Manager every time you switch profile isn't ideal and that's why we also introduced a faster way: right-click on the button to open a faster user switching view. I suggest you give it a try to see if it solves your use case :)

Finally, I just want to highlight that going back to the old menu was hidden behind a flag for a reason. We needed a way to toggle the features on and off while development was going on but it really is going along Chromium's philosophy to not hang on to multiple ways of doing the same thing. As usual, about://flags carry with them the disclaimer:

WARNING These experimental features may change, break, or disappear at any time.

If you have some other request for a feature or want to report another bug, I suggest you search on crbug.com for similar things and file a new bug there if you can't find anything that covers what you'd like to report.

Have a great day!

[Stephen Kervin]

Hi

Thanks for your reply, its more information than I was able to find searching the internet and bug databases. 

In this forum I was looking if workaround exists, as per the flags workaround from a few months ago. I am guessing by your answer this is not the case. I have gone for a bug report already.

While I understand the flags are experimental I still cannot see how the new way of visualising users or profiles is considered better or the chosen path. The name written in black on a grey background offers no visual information whatsoever.  While avatars offer a rich array of information including colour , shapes, texture and ideas. As a developer, business person and director of my own business, I work actively with at least 3 chrome users open at any one time and often up to 5-6 of them. I switch between them constantly and the Chromium way makes this all but impossible to do effectively on OSX. Its a huge leap backwards from my point of view. 

Thanks for the tip on the right click, this at least solves for fast switching which just leaves identification as an issue. 

Thanks and regards,

[Jakob Kummerow]

To make windows for different profiles visually distinct, I'd recommend using Chrome themes for them: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/category/themes

[SK]

Hi 

Jakob: Thanks for your input, especially as this seems like the only work around at present. I find themes very distracting. There designs are such they style behind the transparent tabs, or ignore the tabs entirely, meaning adding themse tends to make the windows busy and hard to read. 

I have tried some simple classic themes, like classic blue and classic Black&white, and these are bareable but not great. Again they mess with the tab to background colouring in a non balanced way. For me personally, while i am using simple colour themese as a workaround, cant understand the move away from a picture (avatar) based system which has years of research into its effetiveness and its useably more useable to make a bad sentence. 

Again thanks for the information and workaround .

Much appreciated.

S

[Peter Souza]

My thanks too for the right-click tip.  An unnecessary new behavior to train, but I regularly swap between four and five profiles and find it absurd that Google is making profile switching a multi-step process, a step backwards in UI accessibility

 

[Kevin Neufeld]

Why was the new-avatar-menu-flag removed?  The menu interfere's with other screen management programs, like UltraMon.  Now it's impossible to change profiles.  This is a bug if you ask me.

[PhistucK]

A bug, yes, but is it a Chrome bug? Perhaps the software you use does not (or cannot?) detect overlapping buttons.

☆PhistucK

[Jon Moore]

On Monday, July 27, 2015 at 5:29:35 PM UTC-4, Kevin Neufeld wrote:

Why was the new-avatar-menu-flag removed?  The menu interfere's with other screen management programs, like UltraMon.  Now it's impossible to change profiles.  This is a bug if you ask me.

Ditto. I just had to remove all my DisplayFusionPro MenuBar shortcuts because I couldn't click through to the profile button. 

[Michael Forman]

I like the right click shortcut.  Today I also learned about the ctrl-shift-m shortcut, which acts like you left-clicked the name.  You can then use the keyboard to change users.

However I would LOVE LOVE LOVE for you to be able to change ctrl-shift-m so that it acts as the RIGHT click instead.  then you can ctrl-shift-m, DOWN to switch users

[João Almeida]

Same here, Not having the ctrl+shit+M (or other combo) trigger the fast switch is my biggest annoyance!

[Ali Adair]

Did you user test this change? 

I'd suggest most Chrome users don't use multiple profiles. The ones that do are more tech-literate, or power-using than the majority of users. 

Removing a quick and useful keyboard shortcut these users rely on to switch profiles, and replace it with a buggy right-mouse-button click option, adding multiple clicks to achieve the same action, and then downgrade to harder to use visual feedback of which profile your in, is definitely a step backwards!

Shouldn't user-experience be the number one priority in the changes you make? And not sticking to an abstract ideological philosophy like 'to not hang on to multiple ways of doing the same thing'?

Ali :)

[Matan Goldschmiedt]

Hi,

Is there a keyboard hotkey for windows, instead of having to right click with the mouse?

If not, will one be added? Using Ctrl+Shift+M was very convenient.

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015 at 6:50:38 AM UTC-7, Anthony Vallee-dubois wrote:

[Bruce Johnson]

A keyboard shortcut would be immensely helpful. For web development, it's so common to jump amongst a bunch of profiles, I'd be shocked if there weren't a bunch of newly disgruntled developers at the loss of a mouse-free way to switch profiles.

[Nerses Ohanyan]

I am one of those disgruntled developers.  I feel like my productivity has dropped a few percentage points.

[Aditya]

I would love to see a separate keyboard shortcut as well. "Cmd + Shift + M" menu is very clunky if one has multiple profiles. If there is a feature request for reintroducing a functional keyboard shortcut, please send across the link here. Else one should be created.

 

BTW here are some quick workarounds which work well on OS X:

In the latest version of Chrome on Mac, 44.0.2403.155, I see a menu "People" and figured that I could use the following approaches:

1. enable the "Move focus to the menu bar" option in Mac. Then one can use the key sequence "Ctrl+F2, P, Down Arrow" to access the different profiles.

2. an alternative with less keystrokes required is to use Mac's keyboard shortcuts for apps:

https://support.apple.com/kb/PH13916?locale=en_US

I created two shortcuts for the <profile name>, it works reasonably well. Not a complete solution, but makes things less painful. 

It would have been great to have a separate menu entry to invoke something like the right click menu.

[Nikolay Ninarski]

+1 for making Ctrl+Shift+M open the quick menu.

I understand that the new interface will help more people to use multiple profiles. Just changing the shortcut back to what it did - open the quick menu would help the power users a lot.

It's hard to imagine that such thing would be implemented by developers that are actually using Chrome... 

[JD Retzer]

What baffles me the most about this new update is the apparent lack of regard for single-user machines, or users who have made an effort to hide the menu. At the very least you could add an option to hide it for single-user machines, or machines where proper users have been set up.