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All the way back in 2020, Google began creating the ability for Chrome users to schedule downloads for a later time and date for convenience and bandwidth management. Today, Leopeva64-2 on Reddit, a trusted feature reporter has discovered that Google is now canning this entirely. Previously, it was available only as a developer flag – never as an official feature for users.
In its place, we’re getting something different. Mind you, it’s not a feature that replaces scheduled downloads, but it just so happened to come at the same time as the cancellation of the feature. A new Chrome commit adds support for drag and drop from the new Downloads bubble in the Canary build of the browser (v105).
[DownloadBubble] Support drag and drop
The implementation is mostly forked from DownloadItemView. Let the hoverbutton listen to drag events directly, and pass them to the row view.
Chrome Repository
Normally, downloading something in Chrome requires you to open it in the folder view from the bottom shelf of the browser in order to copy and paste or drag and drop it anywhere using the Windows file explorer, for example. With the aforementioned Download Bubble, which we’ve reported on in the past, in conjunction with this new drag and drop functionality, you’ll simply be able to drag and drop the downloaded file to your desktop, Imgur, or any other website where you’d like to upload it, now with less friction!
When designing software, I feel like Google’s always done pretty good at making it seem fairly user-friendly. If you see something and think “Hey, let me touch that, or let me interact with that directly”, you ought to be able to do so. Downloads have notoriously worked the same way they always have, but they shouldn’t have to retain their archaic structure, right? In time, dragging and dropping your downloads from one location to another will seem like the thing you just do, because it makes sense, and his feature will start us on that journey.
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