How to print with the system dialog in Chrome on the Mac

Posted: December 29, 2019

Although Safari is the natural web browser to use on the Apple Mac, some people prefer to use Google Chrome. When it comes to printing in Chrome, you can choose the print system to use.

Safari is good, but Chrome has several advantages over the Mac's built-in browser and one is that there are hundreds, maybe thousands of extensions for it. There are just a handful for Safari.

Another advantage is that it is cross-platform and is available on Windows and Linux, making it easy to sync settings, bookmarks, history and so on between computers and operating systems. Safari only works on Apple dfevices.

Apart from choosing the web browser, there is another choice when it comes to printing from the browser and this is between Chrome’s built in print facility and the macOS print system dialog. Both are available and you can choose between Chrome and macOS when printing a web page.

Print a web page in Chrome

When you want to print out a web page using Chrome, the usual method is to go to the File menu and select Print. If you look at the File menu, the keyboard shortcut for Print is displayed next to it and you can print by pressing Command+P.

Chrome print settings

This displays Chrome’s print window and it looks straightforward. It has some useful features, like a print preview on the left, plus the usual print options for selecting the paper orientation, the number of copies, printer and so on on the right. You could just select the destination printer at the top and click the Print button down at the bottom, off the bottom of the screenshot.

However, you can get to the macOS system dialog for printing from here and there is a More settings option in the print options panel. Click it to reveal more settings and then click Print using system dialog.

Use the macOS print dialog

Many options are the same, but there are differences, such as on the Presets menu and on the PDF menu. There may be occasions where these extra options are useful. For example, there are print quality settings in the macOS Print dialog and you can choose between normal and draft black and white, and normal and fine color.

Print shortcuts in macOS and Chrome

Going through Chrome’s print window to get to the system print dialog is one step too many for some people, so is there are shortcut? Yes. In fact, there are two.

One thing I always do in applications is to open a menu, hold down the Option key and see if anything changes on it. Try this with Chrome’s File menu and it does indeed change and Print becomes Print Using System Dialog... This means that there is a quicker way to get to the System Dialog.

To get there even faster, use these two keyboard shortcuts: