Google is working on a new Chrome feature that will allow you to define which websites enable or disable the extensions you use. The web browser could also introduce an OCR module in its PDF reader.
You may soon be able to choose when and on which websites to activate your extensions in Google Chrome. That’s all that Leopeva64-2, a Reddit user well known for his ability to unearth upcoming features in software, seems to have discovered.
A new interface and new functions for the extensions menu
By exploring the pages of theChromium bug tracker, he discovered that Google was working on a new interface for the menu dedicated to extensions. The firm would thus be about to add a new button thanks to which it will be possible to activate or deactivate all the extensions simultaneously, on the page of the site consulted. A function that the editor compares, rightly, with that inaugurated by Microsoft in its Edge browser a few months ago and which allows extensions to be paused on the page consulted.
The management of the activation and deactivation of extensions installed in Chrome was, until now, applied automatically for all websites. The arrival of a new option allowing you to choose the websites on which to authorize or not the use of extensions can only be beneficial, for users, as well as for website publishers. Because by offering this flexibility, Google will allow you to decide, for example, on which sites to activate or not a content blocker.
OCR in PDF reader
In addition to this redesign of the extensions menu and this new control system, the redditor also discovered that Google was preparing the arrival of optical character recognition in the PDF reader of its browser.
With this new feature, Chrome will have a new accessibility feature which, when activated, will allow the integrated PDF reader to scan open PDFs in order to extract the texts displayed on the images. The function is already available in Chrome in the form of a flag accessible at the address chrome://flags/#pdf-ocr. However, it does not seem to be fully functional yet. On the stable version of Chrome, its activation does not allow access to the option in the accessibility menu of the browser, and the browser is even unable to open PDFs.
On Chrome Canary, a version intended for developers, activating the flag allows the option to be displayed in the accessibility menu, but the OCR module remains inaccessible once a PDF is opened in the browser. It will probably take a few more weeks or even months before these new features are deployed in the stable version of Chrome.
Leopardeva64-2/Reddit
