How to Password Protect Google Chrome

No matter what operating system you are using, most of us do have the habit of locking our computers while we are away for short spans. This is a good way to ensure that your buddy or niece won’t mess up your computer and also to prevent your computer from data and privacy theft. However, there are times when you have to share your PC with others and he/she can use your browser and easily access your data. Google recently introduced a new feature called “User Manager” which is capable of locking the Chrome browser at request. What’s more interesting about this feature is that you can have multiple accounts to manage different sessions.

Why You Should Password Protect Your Browser

The browser we use holds a lot of important and sensitive information like your browsing history, saved passwords, logged in accounts and sessions, cookies, etc. Moreover, your Chrome browser is tied to your Google account and anyone who has physical access to your browser can access your emails and confidential data. You can prevent all these acts by simply enabling the password protection feature in Google Chrome browser.

Enable Password Protection in Google Chrome

Before going any further, please do note that the new “User Manager” feature utilizes your Google account password as the password for your Chrome browser. This simply means that if you want to use this feature you need to first log in to your Chrome browser using a Google account.

Now open your Chrome browser and navigate to the Chrome experiments page by entering the URL “chrome://flags” in the address bar.


Once you are in the experiments page, search and find “Enable new profile management system.” Now select the option “Enable” from the drop-down menu.


Once changed, click on the “Relaunch Now” button appearing at the bottom of the screen so that the changes made will take effect.


After you relaunch, you will see a small drop-down menu on the upper right corner of the Chrome window. Simply click on that menu and select the option “Lock” to lock the Chrome browser.


Once locked, Chrome will close the window and display all the user profiles (if any). To relaunch your current session, select your profile, enter your Google account password and press the Enter button.


While the Chrome browser is locked, others can still use the browser as a guest user by selecting the option “Browse as Guest” located at the bottom left corner. You can also add users by selecting the option “Add person.”


Since Chrome reloads all the tabs when you unlock, don’t forget to save any of your unsaved work. Since this is still an experimental feature, there is no guarantee that this feature will be in your settings page anytime soon.

Hopefully that helps, and do comment below sharing your thoughts on how useful this new Google Chrome feature is.