Key Takeaways
- Chrome’s Shopping List feature for product pages is flawed, making it difficult to manage bookmarks efficiently.
- Despite attempts to disable the feature, there is no way to turn off Chrome’s Shopping List, causing frustration.
- I wish Google would allow me to customize and turn off Chrome features that are not helpful.
Chrome has many helpful features, but if there’s something you don’t like, you can’t get rid of it.
While I typically use Firefox over Chrome nowadays, I still use Google’s browser for work since I’ve run into some websites that aren’t compatible with Firefox. It’s just better to keep different browsers for different uses for me—when I’m done with work, I’m done with Chrome, simple as that. Chrome’s profiles didn’t work with that sort of mental switchover, even with themes and options to make the profiles’ windows different.
But the more I use Firefox, the more I notice Chrome’s frustrations. The biggest one? I can’t turn Chrome’s wealth of features off.
More of A Hindrance Than A Help
Since I work with commerce posts and buying guides, I look at a lot of product pages. I also need to save a bunch of them. Chrome has a Shopping List feature, which automatically puts product store pages in a special folder and allows you to track prices.
On a surface level, the Shopping List seems like a great feature—until you realize how flawed it is. It seemed random whether Chrome considered a product page, so not everything would automatically go into the Shopping List folder.
Also, if you bookmark any webpage, Chrome will point to the last folder you saved, unless it thinks it’s a product page. Then, it’ll point to the Shopping List folder. If you then save a page not linked to a product, it will… also point to the Shopping List folder. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll end up with a bunch of bookmarks in a folder you probably don’t want them in.
This feature won’t be bad for most people—it can be helpful to have all the items you want to buy in one place. But it interrupted my workflow, so I tried to figure out how to turn it off.
You’re Stuck With It
I tried several methods to disable this feature, including deleting the Shopping List folder (it would be remade when I bookmark another store listing). Exasperated, I took to Reddit to see if anyone else found a solution—and there was one method that involved going into Chrome’s experimental flags and disabling it.
However, this feature is no longer experimental, and as such, there’s no way to turn it off. It’s frustrating, because while the Shopping List isn’t a bad feature in theory, it’s bad for me, and there’s no way to make it so I don’t need to deal with it anymore.
Just let me turn features off, Google.