Google Chrome Canary gains QR code sharing w/ dino cameo

Kyle Bradshaw | Apr 17 2020 - 9:40 am PT

One of the best parts of the web is the ability to easily share a link to a friend to more or less get them to the same page that you’re looking at. While there are numerous ways to share a link with someone online, it’s a bit harder to do in-person without manually typing in a URL. Google Chrome is now ready to change that with its new QR Code sharing option, appearing in the latest Canary builds.

At the end of last year, work began in Google Chrome to enable sharing via QR codes, and as spotted by Android Police, the feature has finally arrived in a working state in the latest version of Chrome Canary for Windows and Mac — Chrome OS will surely be soon to follow. Like any other in-progress Chrome feature, you’ll need to enable a flag first.

Enable sharing page via QR Code

Enables right-click UI to share the page’s URL via a generated QR Code.

#sharing-qr-code-generator

Once enabled, you’ll have two ways to access a brand new QR Code menu in Chrome — through the “QR code” button in the address bar and the “Generate QR code for this page” option in the right-click menu. When the menu opens, you’ll see a shiny new QR code for the page you’re browsing, complete with Chrome’s offline dino in the center. This code can be then scanned with Google Lens or any other app with QR scanning capabilities.

If you notice that you need to make a change to the URL, such as removing the anchor portion — like “#disqus_thread” for this page — you can quickly edit the URL and Chrome will spit out an updated QR code. It’s been discovered though, that there is a limit to how long of a URL you can make a QR code for, with the maximum currently set to 84 characters.

Below the QR code, there’s a handy “Download” button, however as this is still a work-in-progress feature, the button currently downloads an all-black image instead of the actual QR code. Similarly, Chrome for Android has been poised to pick up QR code sharing in its new share sheet, but the spot for the code currently still appears blank.

As the QR code creator is only just now beginning to work, we likely will not see it launch properly until Chrome 84 later on this year.