What are Chrome flags?

Key Takeaways

[Music] now you might have heard of chrome flags well these are a way to enable additional debugging tools or to try out new or experimental features in chrome for example chrome wanted to allow users to try out picture-in-picture video functionality before rolling it out to everyone so the feature was made available behind a flag for people to try it out and to give feedback the code and design were you know tested and polished based on the feedback and so now you can use picture in picture by default in chrome and it works really well so i'm sam dutton and i work with the chrome team as a developer advocate and in this video i'll show you how to make the most of chrome flags what they're for and how they work just to be clear though before i start most chrome users will never need to use chrome flags and if you do start setting chrome flags you need to be really careful as it says on the chrome flags page by enabling these features you could lose data or compromise your security or privacy and just remember that these flags may stop working or you know be removed without notice if you're an enterprise it admin you should not be using chrome flags in production you might want to take a look at enterprise policies instead but anyway having said all that if you are a web developer or you're just a you know curious nerd and you like trying out new technology then getting to know chrome flags can be really worthwhile so you can set chrome flags from the chrome flags page you find a flag by entering text in the search flags box so for example i want to enable chrome's heads-up display feature for performance metrics so i search for the feature set the value to enabled and re-launch now you can see i've got a heads-up display that shows technical information about web page performance so there are you know a gazillion flags for lots of different types of features some flags affect the way chrome looks or works and some activate new features such as new css features or you know javascript apis that can be used by web developers you'll also notice that there are different flags in different versions of chrome now if you're a web developer you may want to set flags by opening chrome from the command line in a terminal there are a lot more chrome settings you can configure from the command line than the features you can activate or deactivate from the chrome flags page let me show you how that works so here i'm opening a terminal application on a mac if you've never used a terminal it's just an application you can use to tell your computer what to do using text commands you know you know i'm old enough to remember when everything on a computer worked like this but anyway i run the command to open chrome adding the flags i want in this case to always run in incognito mode on every page which is useful for testing chrome without login now that's just one example and there are many many other flags for activating deactivating and configuring less well-known features a couple of things to be aware of here it's possible that flags you set could conflict with each other in particular the defaults for a chrome flags setting might in some cases override your command line configurations so you know if the flags you set running chrome from the command line don't work as expected it's worth checking your chrome flags page also the chrome flags page might not show the flag settings you've used from the command line instead take a look at chrome version so that's chrome flags the chromium.org website explains how to set flags from the command line for android as well as on desktop and my colleague peter has compiled a very long list of chrome flags on this page the last time i checked there are more than 1400 of them and there are actually lots more flags available to configure javascript apis and other features you can find out more about them from api documentation and proposal explainers if you have any questions about chrome flags or you know just if anything's not clear in this video please feel free to contact me via twitter and thanks for watching and be sure to check out the other videos in the chrome concepts series [Applause] [Music] you