Chrome is finally adding social media options to its new share menu

The Chrome Browser’s new share menu that appears in the Omnibox is gaining a new trick – social sharing. While Chrome the share sheet in Chrome OS has already begun to implement these share destinations – things like Twitter, Facebook, and more based on what applications or web apps you have installed on your device – the browser has been lagging quite a bit behind.

I’ve long since yearned for a share button on desktop Chrome, and have complained about its absence many times in recent history. While mobile has been ahead of the curve for years with its ability to natively interconnect experiences, users have had to copy and paste URLs from the browser into other websites for far too long.

Now, the share menu which is being tested on Chrome Canary at this time (recently having changed its icon from the traditional and universal share image to a paper airplane) features new options like mail, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, and LinkedIn, as seen over on Chrome Story.

The menu already has options for directly copying the link from the browser’s Omnibox without having to highlight it first, as well as the ability to generate a QR code for the page you’re currently viewing, a cast option, one to send it to another device like a desktop or phone, and lastly an option to save the entire web page locally.

For now, these additions do not feature custom favicons for each service, and Dinsan indicates that he was not responsible for choosing these specific social media destinations. Similarly, they are currently not customizable. For example, he wanted to swap LinkedIn with Reddit, but there seems to be no option for doing so.

It’s important to note that this is super early in development, and things are very likely to change before this comes to Chrome Stable. The development team is basically just experimenting at this point, so be slow to make a judgment on its implementation. I should also mention that we saw the same implementation, albeit much more visually striking in the form of the Chrome OS Sharing Hub back in February (see image below). I’m convinced that when all is said and done, Google will make the Chrome version identical to this. I am interested in hearing your thoughts on exactly what you would like from this feature before it rolls out officially though, so let’s discuss in the comments section below!