Google introduced their Print Preview functionality back in the Chrome 15 days, and until Chrome 20 or so, you could go into “about:flags” and turn it off. In Chrome 20 or so, they took that option away. Now all the threads online are full of “just use the “Command-Option-P” crap ((Google seems to think Adobe had the right idea when they created their own Print dialog, when in fact, it’s really stupid. Augment the dialog, don’t replace it with something completely different than every other app)). While I rarely print, I do frequently “Save as PDF”, and I find the process, and output much easier/better using the system dialog.
But! It’s still there. Just not easy to set via the GUI. So, open up a terminal, and paste in the following:
defaults write com.google.Chrome DisablePrintPreview -boolean true
And then quit and relaunch Chrome. Enjoy your native print dialog.
Thanks to the Chromium Admin documentation here. I knew this had to be there still for all us admin’s that want to enforce this stuff on labs, etc.
UPDATE: Google (Chromium) have killed this ability as of Chrome Version 39. This makes our lab environment very annoying as printers show up as “mcx_0”, etc. Not their actual names. Sad.
Ryan McGeary says
This works great, but also completely disables the Chrome print dialog altogether, so there’s no way to use it with a different keyboard shortcut in the event that you wanted to test the default behavior that most users experience.
I wrote a post about an alternative method:
http://ryan.mcgeary.org/2012/09/13/disable-chrome-print-dialog-use-osx-instead/
“Fortunately, OS X comes with a relatively simple way to override keyboard shortcuts in specific Applications. Go to System Preferences -> Keyboard -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Once there, select Application Shortcuts and add a new shortcut for Google Chrome.”
“Make sure the Menu Title reads `Print Using System Dialog…` exactly, and give it the standard print shortcut (`⌘P`).”
staze says
Ryan,
Good to hear/see. I, for one, have no need/interest in the Google print dialog, so completely killing it is what I was after, but your work around seems like it might be better for those that can’t avoid having to deal with the Google dialog in some way. I just dislike the fact that companies (Google, Adobe, etc) think they need to write their own print dialog, that does really nothing better than the system level one. Like Adobe and their stupid AIR based installers. Why?!
Anyway… Thanks!