14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome has long stopped being just a browser and is now the company's beachhead into the desktop market.
Granted, that has always been Chrome's purpose, but the recent introduction of the new packaged apps, now simply called Chrome Apps, made Google's intentions clear to everyone.
But it's not just via apps that Chrome is conquering the desktop and subverting the traditional operating system, it's via the multi-user profile support as well.
The feature has always made more sense on Chrome OS, where it's absolutely necessary, but it can come in quite handy on other desktop operating systems as well.
With multiple user support, Google is saying that you don't need to use multiple accounts on your computer; it's enough just to switch accounts in Chrome. Basically, the message is, anything in your computer beyond Chrome is inconsequential. For most people, that might as well be true.
So it's no surprise that Google is pushing even further with the multi-user feature, bringing the user selector out of the browser tab and into its own window, for example.
The new Chrome user manager, spotted by François Beaufort, looks a lot more like a traditional user manager than the previous incarnation.
The feature is not available to most users, as it has just landed in the latest Chromium builds only on Windows, and even there you have to enable it by hand.
The new user manager should be making its way into the dev channel Chrome soon enough, but it will be weeks before it moves to the beta channel and the stable channel beyond that.
If you want to see it in action, navigate to the Chrome flags page, chrome://flags, find the "New profile management" flag and enable it. You'll also have to enable the "Gaia profile info" flag for it to work.