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Google Chrome now stops drag-and-drop from taking over your tab

Have you ever gone to use drag-and-drop on Google Chrome, only for the file to take over the tab entirely? It’s a really frustrating problem, but one the browser is set to fix in the very near future!

A Microsoft Edge developer detailed on his blog a new change that’s coming to both Microsoft’s Chromium-based browser and Google Chrome. In current and former versions of Google Chrome and many other browsers, almost any sort of file including images and PDFs that you drag over the browser window would open in a tab when you let go. That can be handy, but it has an unintended consequence on some pages.

If a webpage is using drag-and-drop in Google Chrome, those files can be a bit picky about the feature and, if you’re not careful, you’ll just end up with the file closing out the website and take over that tab. It’s very frustrating!

With Chromium 85.0.4163.0, a change is being made to this process. By default, a drag-and-drop action with a file won’t open that file in the current tab. Rather, it opens a new one. To open a file on the current tab, the file has to be dragged up to the top of the screen and dropped on the tab itself. You can see this in action below.

Google Chrome has already adopted this change in the latest Canary update and, soon, it will be adopted in Microsoft’s Chromium-based Edge browser. The change should land in stable updates in the next few weeks.

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