X

MacOS Mojave beta broke Chrome's checkboxes. Here are two ways to bring them back

Bad beta!

Matt Elliott Senior Editor
Matt Elliott is a senior editor at CNET with a focus on laptops and streaming services. Matt has more than 20 years of experience testing and reviewing laptops. He has worked for CNET in New York and San Francisco and now lives in New Hampshire. When he's not writing about laptops, Matt likes to play and watch sports. He loves to play tennis and hates the number of streaming services he has to subscribe to in order to watch the various sports he wants to watch.
Expertise Laptops, desktops, all-in-one PCs, streaming devices, streaming platforms
Matt Elliott
Matt Elliott/CNET

Perhaps it's a move to nudge me toward Safari and its fancy new favicons. Or maybe it's just a bug. Whatever the case may be, the beta of MacOS Mojave has broken a small but important part of Chrome : Checkboxes. Without checkboxes, I can't, for example, conduct my online banking in Chrome or use CNET's content management system. Any web form where I need to check a box is unworkable.

I installed each iteration of the Mojave beta with the hope that Chrome's checkboxes will return, but I'm now on the fourth beta of Mojave (MacOS 10.14), and Chrome's checkboxes are still missing. Thankfully, there's an easy fix. Two, actually.

Watch this: We took a spin around MacOS Mojave public beta and here's what we found

Chrome checkbox extension

Install the Mojave Checkbox-Fix extension and you'll no longer be singing the missing checkbox blues. The extension works by changing the zoom-level of each page to 1.000001, which allows the checkboxes to appear. For some reason, they are invisible at Chrome's default zoom level but appear at any other zoom level.

Zoom to the rescue

If you don't want to install the extension, then you can just just zoom in or out on a page with missing checkboxes and they'll appear. You won't even need to refresh the page. Just hit Command-plus or -minus. Or to go View > Zoom In (or Out).

Read more: Everything you need to know about MacOS Mojave