How To Add Locally Managed Users in Chrome OS

I ordered an Android tablet for my wife the other day, for our wedding anniversary. I had a selfish motive also behind this, get Android 4.2 on it, with multi user support, so that I can use it too! I was reading about Android multi user feature during the day and I see François Beaufort posting about a new feature in Chrome OS, added to the latest dev release.

Local users.

Local Users on Chrome OS

What is the difference between a local user and a normal user? You can create a user without a gmail account. At present, Chrome OS lets you add new users but you need to provide a Google account for each user. Then you have guest account, which does not save any of the settings or history from the browsing session.

Now you have local users.

Local users on Chrome OS is pretty much the same as user accounts you create on your Windows PC or Mac. You enter a user name and set a password for the new user, and they login. On Chrome OS, you do this from the login page (and not from the settings panel of Chromebook’s owner account, surprisingly).

This feature is currently behind a flag (enable from chrome://flags) and that means things are still being cooked, baked and served.  Nothing is final. So we may see some changes to the implementation before this feature is final and available to all Chrome OS users.

I created a new user account from the login screen and tried this out. It looked pretty much the same as a normal Chrome OS account. I had all the pre-installed apps, settings, option to change wallpaper etc. Since this account is not connected to any Google ID, I had to login to Gmail again, to access my stuff.

Since things are still in the very early stages of development, there are no options to control the browsing experience of local users. There were no restrictions on browsing as well (I tried opening some adult content, you see..)

Expect more posts on this feature as Google push more tweaks. For now, here is how to add a local user. Screenshots courtesy of François Beaufort.

– Go to chrome://flags and activate “Enable locally managed users”
– Log out
– Click on “Add user”
– Click on “Create managed user”
– Enter username and set a password.
– Click Continue

That’s all!