Chrome is losing four handy tab options that Google says you're not using

Google is stripping 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 all destined for the chop, after developers concluded they weren't used often enough to justify their existence.

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You can see the changes now by downloading the latest version of Chrome Canary (a preview version of the browser intended for developers and anyone who wants to try new features first).

Keeping tabs?

As BleepingComputer reports, some developers at Google have wanted to strip back the tab context menu for years, believing it to be unnecessarily cluttered.

According to usage data, only 8.92% of users used the menu to reopen closed tab option, 6.63% used it to open a new tab, 2.2% used it to close other tabs, and 0.64% used it to bookmark all tabs.

Chrome developer Peter Kasting 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 we've already seen that Google 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 like the idea of being given less information about websites.

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Via Techdows