Last Updated on 28/08/2019 by TDH Publishing (A)
Google is burning some of the fat from Chrome and has decided to remove several options from the context menu that appears when you right-click a tab.
The options to create a new tab, close every tab except the current one, bookmark all open tabs and reopen a closed tab are now all destined for the chop after developers concluded they weren’t used often enough by users to justify their presence or existence.
If one is operating the stable release of Chrome, which is version 76, a right-click on a tab at the top of his browser will show him ten or so options in the context menu, giving him the ability to open a new tab, duplicate a tab, mute a site, close other tabs, and more. How many out of these are utilized by users regularly? Probably, very few.
As BleepingComputer reports, few developers at the tech giant have wanted to strip back the tab context menu for years, believing it to be unnecessarily cluttered. According to a shared usage data report, only 8.92% of users utilized the menu to reopen closed tab option, 6.63% used it to open a new tab, 2.2% used it to close other tabs, while merely 0.64% used it to bookmark all tabs.
Peter Kasting, who is a Chrome developer, explained that there are still ways to access advanced tab controls without trawling through menus: “To flush your excess tabs, click the first tab you want to close, shift-click the last tab to select the whole range, then hit Ctrl+W.”
That’s not exactly intuitive, but it’s been already observed that tech giant isn’t too fussed about annoying a few power users. It recently pressed ahead with its decision to chop the www off URLs in Chrome’s address bar, despite protests from users and developers who didn’t disagree with the idea of being given less information about websites.
