Chrome’s new Custom Context Menu Revamps the Link/Image/Video Context Menu

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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!