How to Try Out Google Chrome’s New Suggestion Removal Option

Google Chrome continues to be the world’s number one browser, and this shows just how advanced it is compared to the existing browsers that come pre-installed on the existing desktop and mobile platforms.

At the same time, Google keeps improving Chrome with more and more features, some of them based on customer feedback and supposed to refine the overall experience going forward.

One of the latest improvements that Google has been experimenting with concerns the suggestions shown in the Omnibox, making it a lot easier for users to remove the entries they no longer want to see.

The suggestions that are provided as you type in the omnibox also include websites that you have previously visited, and until now, removing one of these entries was possible by simply pressing Shift + Del.

However, the latest Canary build further polishes this system, introducing options to remove a suggestion using nothing more than the mouse.

As noted by TechDows, Google Chrome Canary 80.0.3951.0 and later is required to get such capabilities.

To try out this new feature, all you need to is to activate a dedicated flag. It’s called:

“Omnibox Suggestion Transparency Options”

To enable it, fire up Chrome and then type:


chrome://flags


And then search for the flag using the name indicated above. If you want to use the shortcut, you can copy the following code and paste it in the address bar of the browser:


chrome://flags/#omnibox-suggestion-transparency-options


As the source mentioned above notes, the new feature is based on a suggestion that was originally proposed no less than 11 years ago. The first post was made by a Chromium engineer on September 4, 2008, and indicated that the existing Shift + Del suggestion removal option was rather difficult to discover by users of the browser.

“Currently, on Desktop, it’s possible to delete some Omnibox Suggestions using the keyboard shortcut Shift+Delete. This is not very discoverable and mostly unknown to users. This bug is to add some kind of discoverable UI to users to allow them to delete suggestions that can be deleted (ones that are sourced from their History, for instance),” the post reads.

At that point, the engineer proposed two different approaches, namely a right-click context menu that would have displayed more options when right-clicking a suggestion and a trash icon displayed next to the suggestion. By the looks of things, the latter option is the one that Google liked more, but a Chromium dev said three weeks ago that the visible button is something that “we’re still experimenting” with.

For the time being, there’s no ETA as to when the feature would make its way to the stable version of Google Chrome, but it shouldn’t take too long before this happens anyway. The feature already seems to be working pretty smoothly, so I’m guessing that once Google decides on the approach that it wants to use, it should go live pretty fast.

Most likely, similar features will also make their way…