If you've updated Chrome recently, you may have noticed that context menus—the ones you see when you right-click anything—have changed. Instead of being just like any other right-click menu, they're now stylized with white backgrounds and smaller text in the center. Personally, I hate them. If you hate them too, here's how to get the old menus back.


The new menus only appear in Chrome for Windows, and only then in beta, dev, and Canary. You'll need to add a flag to the shortcut you use to launch Chrome to get the old menus back:

Right-click your Google Chrome shortcut (if it's in the taskbar, right-click the icon, then right-click "Google Chrome" in the popup menu). Select "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab if it's not already highlighted. In the "Target" field, add this to the end of whatever's already there (with two hyphens before "disable"): -–disable-new-menu-style Click Apply, then OK.

That's all there is to it. Now, whenever you launch Chrome from that shortcut, you'll see the old right-click menu style. Yes, "hate" is a strong word (and I obviously don't mean it), but I certainly don't think the look of the right-click menu is something that needed to be changed, and I preferred the old look better. Thankfully, this flag fixes the "improvement," at least until Google removes the flag entirely.


Update: Reader Paul VC shares that as of Chrome 27, you'll need to do this every reboot. Here's how:

The change suggested in the article is not permanent: one has to perform the above procedure each time your computer is rebooted.



Furthermore, an extra step is necessary: one has to "kill" (a.k.a "end task") all open Google Chrome background processes via the Windows Task Manager - press ctrl-alt-del to get to it).

Thanks Paul!

Don't like Chrome's New Menus? Here is how to Disable Them | Techdows