Emoji usage proliferates on phones and tablets because it’s very fast to bring up that virtual keyboard on Android and iOS. Now, Google Chrome is working on making it easier to use emoji on desktops thanks to a new right-click shortcut.
All desktop operating systems today have a way to bring up a special emoji/symbols picker. Usually hidden behind a key combination (cmd + ctrl + space on Mac), it’s not very accessible for the average user.
Chrome wants to make that picker more convenient to reach by adding a shortcut to the menu that appears when you right-click in any text field on the web. “Emoji” will be listed first in that menu and opens the native emoji selector for your operating system. The Experiment description notes that it is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS.
Emoji Context Menu
Enables the Emoji picker item in context menus for editable text areas. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS
This feature is currently only available in the very developer-focussed and often times unstable Chrome Canary channel (right now version 67.0.3389.0 for Mac). To enable, users can head to chrome://flags and search emoji or by entering the link below and then enabling:
chrome://flags/#enable-emoji-context-menu
If you need some assistance, be sure to check out our guide, which also helps you install Chrome Canary to test the feature out now.
We are likely several weeks away from the feature making its way to the stable version of Chrome. However, it will be a very welcome addition given how tedious it is to enter emoji on platforms like Chrome OS.
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