If you’re a Chrome user, you may have noticed that some of your favorite websites don’t work as well as they used to. Maybe you’ve even had to disable some of your extensions in order to get the site working again. There are a few ways to do this, but it’s always best to take the time to figure out how and where each one works. Here’s how:

  1. Open Chrome and click on the three lines in the top left corner of the window. This will open a menu with all of your extensions.
  2. Scroll down until you find “Plugins.” This is where you’ll find all of your individual plugins. If they’re enabled, they’ll be listed under “Enabled.” If they’re not enabled, they’ll be listed under “Unable.”
  3. Click on one of them and it will be disabled. You can then enable it if you want by clicking on the checkbox next to it and then clicking on “Enabled.”

Disabling Plugins in Google Chrome

If you head to about:plugins in your address bar, you’ll probably see a list of plugins, but won’t be able to disable them yet. What you’ll need to do is switch over to the Dev (Update: Or Beta) channel of Chrome, which gives you access to all the latest features—though you might be warned that sometimes the dev and beta channels might be less stable than the release channe.

Ready to proceed? Head to the Dev / Beta Channel page, and then click the link to run the installer. You’ll be prompted to restart Chrome when you’re done.

Note that Mac and Windows users can both run an installer to switch. Linux users will have to install a package.

Note: Once you’ve switched to the Dev or beta channel, you can’t really switch to the stable channel. You’ll have to uninstall Chrome and then reinstall the regular version.

Now that you’ve switched to the dev or beta channel and restarted your browser, head to about:plugins in the address bar, and then just disable each plugin you really don’t need.

Plugins you can generally live without?  Java, Acrobat, Microsoft Office, Windows Presentation Foundation, Silverlight. These will be on a case-by-case basis, of course, but the vast majority of large websites don’t require any of those. When it comes right down to it, the only plugin that most people require is Flash… and leave the “Default Plug-in” alone too.

Special thanks to @jordanconway for pointing out the solution.