Chrome OS tests a feature that makes the new Share Hub menu a little more like your Android phone

Greetings from the world of tomorrow

Google's always working to improve Chrome OS, and sometimes that means bringing it features that have already hit Chrome on other platforms. One of the additions it's been working on is a centralized Sharing Hub with an easy-to-use menu for sharing content with applications and other people. Now users trying out that experimental feature can also enable a new copy-to-clipboard button.

Can’t you just copy a link with Ctrl-c or a few mouse clicks? Sure, but this is Chrome OS we're talking about, and not everyone's working with the same input methods. Given the growing popularity of convertible Chromebooks with touchscreen interfaces, this new feature spotted by About Chromebooks sounds like a welcome quality-of-life improvement, though we should first point out: the feature isn't live in the version of Chrome OS on your Chromebook just yet, but it has been spotted in a recent Dev channel release for Chrome OS 97.

Both the copy-to-clipboard button and the Sharing Hub are still in the experimental stage. To use them you’ll have to be on a recent Dev Channel release and change a few flags in your browser’s internal settings. To enable the Sharing Hub (a prerequisite for the copy-to-clipboard button) type chrome://flags#chromeos-sharing-hub in the omnibar, then select “Enabled” from the dropdown menu on the right.

Once that’s set up, type in chrome://flags#enable-sharesheet-copy-to-clipboard and again select “Enabled” on the right. After you've made all the changes, restart your browser to check out what you've just switched on. The Sharing Hub is accessible by clicking the share icon at the right of the omnibar, and this new button make it a breeze to copy the URL of the page you're currently viewing to your device's clipboard for easy sharing.

Remember, this feature is still experimental and not yet available on stable at the time of writing, so give it a try if you're curious but don't be surprised if you run into a little unexpected behavior. Hopefully we'll be seeing the final Sharing Hub roll out soon.

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