All that you love will be refactored away

Someone was kind enough to let me know that as of version 54, Chrome has removed the enable-panels flag. This breaks the entire point of my “Panel View” extensions, like for Keep and Play Music.

October 14, 2016

This was brought up back when Chrome 54 was still in beta, and now that it’s a stable build, it’s in full effect now. My Panel View extensions were never anything more than a hobby, but until this morning’s Chrome update, I still used Panel View for Keep. I’m sad to see it go.

I know this comes as part of Google’s push to eliminate Chrome apps in favor of web apps, but I think this is different. First of all, this is a change which affects Chrome extensions, not apps. Chrome apps never allowed panel windows, extensions did. Secondly, this isn’t something that all browsers supported (which is the direction Google is going with phasing out Chrome app support). This was something specific to Chrome itself.

Truth be told, panels were never put into spotlight the way that perhaps they’d been intended to be. They weren’t even enabled unless you were running the dev branch or had enabled them manually in chrome://flags. But they were a nice extra thing, and I’m going to miss it.