Learn Nav, Workspace Undo & an Opt-In New Tab Page

Learn Nav: A Tutorial Built Into the Side Panel

Nav now has a permanent, browsable list of everything it does, living in the side panel. Unlike a normal walkthrough, progress is earned by actually using each feature rather than by reading a description of it. Rows that correspond to a setting carry the switch right there, so you can turn something on without leaving the tutorial to hunt through options — and if you change it on the options page instead, Learn Nav stays in sync.

The list is curated, not exhaustive — 39 entries, each kept only because it teaches a real capability, and each checked against what the extension actually does. Every collapsed section now carries a one-line description of what’s inside, so you can tell whether it’s worth opening before you open it, and the small feature diagrams replay when you hover them instead of freezing on their last frame. For the few controls Learn deliberately doesn’t carry, the row says where they live — and one click opens the exact settings card, expanded, scrolled into view, and highlighted, rather than dropping you at the top of the page.

Undo a Workspace You Didn’t Mean to Create

Creating a new workspace sets your current tabs aside and clears the window down to one blank tab. If that wasn’t what you meant to do, there’s now an Undo: it puts your tabs back and removes the empty workspace the creation made. Undo declines once real pages are open in that window, so it can never throw away work you have already started.

Saving a window as a workspace also always confirms your tabs are safe now — naming the workspace they went into, with a Put-them-back button — wherever you saved it from. That includes the in-page sidebar, which used to close with the tabs before its message could appear, leaving you looking at an empty window with no word on where everything went.

Settings Open With a Hand, Not a Checklist

The options page used to greet you with an 18-row status checklist that mostly repeated what Learn Nav and the settings cards below it already cover. It now opens with a short Getting started card instead: a pointer to Learn Nav, a one-click button that turns on the power-user setup in one go, and the keyboard cheat sheet folded away until you ask for it. The settings themselves continue below, unchanged.

One Prompt at a Time

Open the side panel on a fresh install and Nav used to stack its asks — the welcome card, a three-button question about sync, and a note about keyboard shortcuts could all render at once. Now exactly one shows at a time, in a sensible order. The sync question also waits until it has something to be about: it only appears once you have a workspace to sync, instead of firing on a timer at someone with nothing to sync yet. And the settings header no longer shows a green “Synced” before a first sync has actually completed — until then it says it’s waiting, which is the truth.

The New Tab Page Is Now Opt-In

Users told us this plainly — “it changed my chrome configuration without asking,” as one put it. Replacing your new tab is a change to something you already had, so for new installs it now waits to be asked for — it sits in Learn Nav with a picture of what it looks like and a switch, and turns on when you want it. If you’re already using the custom new tab page, nothing changes; Nav checks for real prior use, like saved workspaces or an install that’s more than five minutes old, before deciding. And if you keep it off, you can now choose where new tab sends you instead of Google.

Fixed: Two Windows Sharing One Workspace Could Lose Tabs

Several reports described the same thing happening — “switching workspaces closes the tabs in the other workspace,” as one user put it. The cause: switching to a workspace checked whether another window already held it, but two other paths that claim a workspace didn’t. Once two windows held the same workspace, whichever one saved last overwrote the other’s tabs. The check now happens wherever a window claims a workspace at all, pointing you at the window that already has it, and any leftover duplicate gets cleaned up when Nav starts.

Fixes & Other Changes

• Super drag now ships off by default for new installs.
• The thin sidebar strip at the screen edge no longer swallows clicks meant for the page underneath it, and it no longer loads favicons from addresses on your own network, which was making Chrome ask for local network access on every site you visited.
• Opening a new tab no longer flashes white in dark mode.
• New “New empty workspace” command, added without a default key since Chrome’s four shortcut slots were already taken — assign one yourself at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.
• No new permissions.