Two ways (one new) to open Chrome extension options pages in the browser

While I'm still pretty disappointed that Google removed any option to display new or updated Chrome extensions in the official web store, progress is being made elsewhere.

Options are part of many Chrome extensions. They enable users to modify the behavior or appearance of extensions.

Not every extension ships with an options page though but many do.

The only way to open the options of a Chrome extension up until now was to open chrome://extensions in the browser and click on the options link next to the extension.

This loads the options on the page so that modifications can be made to them.

The options page of a Chrome extension can also be opened by loading chrome-extension://Extension-ID/options.html in the browser directly.

This is not really practicable as you need the ID of the extension to load the options page this way.

Google has added a new method to open Chrome's extension options page in Chrome 40. This new method is special as extension developers can select it to be the default way of displaying options to the user.

As you can see on the screenshot above, options can now also be displayed in an overlay on the extensions page. You can close the options page with a click on the x icon to go back to the extensions page.

The click on the options button on the other hand opens the options page on in a new tab in the browser so that you have to close the tab to get back to the extensions page.

Extension developers can implement the new way of displaying settings to users but Chrome users can also load the new options page for any extension they have installed directly.

It is necessary to know the extension ID for that though. The general structure is the following: chrome://extensions/?options=Extension-ID

The easiest way to deal with this is to bookmark the new options page so that you can open it again at a later point in time either by entering a few words in the address bar or by clicking on the bookmark.

While not a major change, it is important to know about it. My opinion is that it improves the handling since you access the options on the same page so that new tabs are not opened anymore in the browser whenever options are accessed.