Despite the fact that Google’s Chrome browser is the market leader in Internet browsers, Google is always working to bring additional features to millions of users in order to stay competitive. Scroll anchoring is one such feature that, after nearly 10 months in testing, was finally released to end users. But even if it takes Google months to officially release its experimental features, users can go to chrome://flags to try them out right now. Just recently we showed you how to enable the new Custom Context Menu feature in Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary, for instance. This time, we wanted to talk about a potentially exciting feature that Google is working on called copyless paste.

Copyless Paste

This new feature can be found in Chrome versions 59+, meaning users on the Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary channels can access it. All you have to do is paste the following text into your address bar: chrome://flags#enable-copyless-paste.

Just based on the description of this flag, it seems like a really smart change to potentially integrate Google Chrome with the rest of the apps on our device. The feature promises to provide suggestions for text input based on recent web browsing context, and as an example it states that if you are looking at a restaurant’s website and switch to the Google Maps app then the keyboard would display that restaurant’s name as a search suggestion.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that this flag actually works yet. I’ve tried going to numerous restaurants’ webpages and then opening the Maps app, but I never saw the text input suggestions in Gboard that the feature promised. I’ve also asked a friend running Android O to try to get this feature to work, but to no avail.

We’ve heard rumors of this feature being worked on before Android O was officially unveiled, and based on the description of the “Copy Less” feature that was exclusively provided to VentureBeat at the time, we have strong reason to suspect that this Chrome flag and the rumored feature are one and the same.

I am not exactly sure how this feature actually works under the hood (any experts in Chromium are free to chime in), but I do know that it is currently in active development and testing so it may take some time for this feature to actually start working.

We’ll be following the development of this feature to see how it pans out, and will update you if/when it starts working.

Google is constantly at work adding additional features to the world’s most popular internet browser, Chrome. Given the sheer number of users that rely on Google Chrome on a daily basis, Google rolls out new features after a lot of internal testing. It took nearly 10 months for the scroll anchoring feature to begin officially rolling out, for instance. Although some of these features may take a long time to officially roll out, users can still try them out by enabling the experimental flag in chrome://flags. Today, we would like to draw your attention towards one such experimental feature known as the custom context menu, which revamps the look and feel of the context menu that pops up when you long-press any link, image, or video.

Chrome’s New Context Menu

For years, anytime you long-pressed a link, image, or video in Google Chrome you would see a dialog of text buttons show up. Spend enough time with Chrome and you’ll grow accustomed to where exactly you need to tap as soon as the dialog shows up. Google wants to do away with potential misclicks and confusion by changing the way the long-press context menu looks.

Here are some screenshots of the changes to give you a better idea of what I’m talking about:

As you can see in the screenshots above, the new context menu adds icons to help you quickly decide which option to press. For the link context menu, the URL is collapsed by default, which makes longer URLs (such as those copied from a Google search) take up much less screen space. Tapping on the URL in the new context menu will expand it. The new image context menu also adds a small thumbnail of the image that you long-pressed on, which is pretty cool. The video context menu doesn’t add anything extra apart from a download icon next to the text.

Finally, in those cases where long-pressing opens up a context menu that lists both link-based and image-based options, such as when you long-press on a thumbnail image that is part of an article, the new context menu separates the link and image context menu options.

Admittedly, the new Custom Context Menu doesn’t really add much to Google Chrome in terms of features. However, for those of us who frequently use the context menu to share links, images, or videos, this revamp is certainly a welcome quality of life change.

Enabling the new Context Menu

Chrome’s new Custom Context Menu can be enabled on Chrome versions 59+. On Android, that means users who are on the Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary channels. If you are on either of these builds, you can enable the flag by pasting the following text into your address bar:

chrome://flags#enable-custom-context-menu

Change “default” to “enabled” then tap on the button that shows up asking you to restart the browser. You should now see Chrome’s new context menu.

What do you think of this UI change? Let us know in the comments below!