A new feature coming to Google Chrome will allow you to copy chunks of text on one device, and paste it on another.
As XDA Developers reports, the new shared clipboard is available to try now in Chrome Canary – an early release of the browser intended for developers. To give it a try, start by installing Canary on both your desktop and smartphone and logging in using your Google account.
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Once that's done, open the browser on your desktop and navigate to chrome://flags/. Use the search box to look for 'clipboard' and use the checkboxes to activate the following flags:
- Enable receiver device to handle shared clipboard feature
- Enable shared clipboard feature signals to be handled
- Sync Clipboard Service
The first two of these flags appeared in Canary back in August, but they haven't actually done anything until now. When they're activated, relaunch the browser.
Send away
The shared clipboard tool works in a similar way to the shared tabs function that arrived with Chrome 77 earlier this week.
Highlight a section of text on your desktop, right-click it and select the new option 'Send text to...' followed by your device name. A message will appear on your phone informing you that the text has been received.
At the moment it seems that you can only send text, not images or other content, but hopefully that will change with a future release. For the time being though, it's still a very handy function and a welcome addition to Chrome.
