Let’s face it – the account manager on Chromebooks has been in need of an overhaul for quite some time. Chrome OS blurs the line between secondary personal accounts and local users, making it frustrating for the owner to add or manage people on their devices. With more users adding secondary accounts to their Chromebook in the face of the global pandemic, many will have lamented the confusing setup process. The developers at Google finally realized they could make account management a lot easier, so they decided to do something about it.
In the Chrome OS Dev channel, we noticed that Google is reworking the account manager to make it much easier to create new users. If you want to view the new flow, you can copy and paste it chrome: // flags / # account-management-flows-v2 in the URL bar and enable it from the drop-down menu. After you restart your Chromebook, you will see a significant change in the ‘Accounts’ menu in the OS settings. Here’s a quick look.
The updated user interface of the account manager.
The redesigned menu looks much tighter. Unlike before, the page clearly explains how to set up multiple accounts on Chrome OS. Plus, it makes it clear that your apps and OS settings will only sync with your primary Google account – the original account you signed up with and signed in with. The manager now explicitly differentiates between your primary account, which is much better than simply displaying a small label. The new UI also moves ‘Security & Login’ and ‘Manage Other People’ to ‘Privacy & Security’ and renames the ‘People’ category to ‘Accounts’, creating a separation in OS settings between local users and multiple signing created -in accounts.
While a revamped account manager may not seem like a huge change, a small amount of polishes like this can significantly improve the overall user experience. With people spending more time online than ever, adding multiple user accounts to Chrome OS will now be less of a headache, especially for those with different school and work accounts. Since there isn’t much going on, I hope this nifty improvement will hit the Chrome OS Stable channel soon. Time will tell.
