Sometimes Google Chrome for unknown reasons shows popup error message that preference cannot be read. There is a simple solution for this problem in Ubuntu. You just need to remove the Google Chrome folder from .config and restart Google Chrome and you check the result. But you should bear in mind that if you remove the folder all history, bookmarks, extensions would be gone also, so better to take a back up and after that you can remove the following folder with this command,
$ rm -rvf ~/.config/google-chrome/