Google Chrome let me know that it needed to be restarted to load an update this morning.  I was a little surprised when it restarted as there was an unexpected icon in the upper left corner.  There was this little cupcake.  Clicking the icon brought up the “profile” menu.

I’m not a big fan of cupcakes.  None of the other optional icons are all that interesting either.  Why clutter up the interface with this stuff?  One of the big selling points for me with the Chrome browser has been the distinct lack of extraneous stuff in the browser.  There has been just the tabs and the address bar and nothing to get in the way of using the browser as efficiently as possible.

More disturbingly, there appears to be no way to make the annoying cupcake icon go away permanently.  The best that can be done is switch to one of the other icons.

The burning question is, of course, why the profile related settings couldn’t have been placed on the regular menu accessible through the small, unobtrusive wrench icon.