If you're a Chrome user who regularly right-clicks tabs to access the context menu options, prepare yourself for some changes. That menu is about to get a lot shorter.
As Techdows reports, after years of debate on the matter and a lot of data crunching, the Chromium team has decided to remove four options from the tab context menu. Those options are:
- New tab
- Close other tabs
- Reopen closed window
- Bookmarks all tabs
There's a discussion on the Chromium bugs forums dating back to 2015 discussing the removal of context menu options "if the usage does not outweigh the cost." A 2016 usage review found all of the above options now being removed had well below 10 percent usage by Chrome users. Bookmark all tabs was the lowest with 0.64 percent.
Reddit user Leopeva64-2 uploaded an image showing the change this will make to the menu:
For power users, this is sure to be a frustrating change because some or all of the options disappearing are genuinely useful.
It's not all bad news, though, as the frame context menu is being updated to include a "Bookmark all tabs" option. It also already includes the option to open a new tab, so two of the four options are at least being retained elsewhere. There are keyboard shortcuts available, for example, opening a new tab can be achieved with CTRL-T.
The context menu changes are present in the latest Chrome Canary build and they will filter down to the main version of Chrome everyone uses in due course. So if you are a regular user, prepare yourself for the change.