14 DAY TRIAL // Two Chrome options allowing users to quickly close a good deal of tabs might soon disappear.
According to a Reddit user, there's evidence in the Chromium project indicating that Google engineers have been planning to remove these menu options for many years, even before the Chromium issue at hand was opened, back in July 2015.
The options we're talking about are "Close other tabs" and "Close tabs to the right," which reside in the menu that appears when right-clicking on a Chrome tab. The first allows you to only keep the tab that you're clicking on, while the rest lets you shut down extra tabs to the right, such as additional Google searches and the pages opened with them.
Years of indecision
These two features have been with Chrome since the browser was launched and they're loved by most users who would rather have a quick way to close numerous tabs than having to click each "x" manually.
"Ben agreed years ago that we could remove them. They are useful in occasional circumstances, but not enough to justify the menu space," a Chromium dev wrote back in 2015.
Although it seemed that the matter would die there, it appears that this past September usage statistics were brought to the table again to push towards action. It looks like only 6% of users of the right-click menu choose to close tabs to the right, and only a little over 2% use the "close other tabs" feature.
The issue seems to have been settled with those stats because it was assigned to staff in February. Engineers are quite likely getting ready to give the features the ax, despite what is now turning into a protest on Reddit.
Too much button-work as an alternative
There are some complex shortcuts available to produce the same effect in order to help users close a large number of tabs. For instance, users can select the first tab they want to close by clicking on it. Then, go to the last tab in the sequence by holding Shift and clicking the tab. This selects all tabs, so all you need to do next to close them all is click Control + W. This, of course, is way too much work.
Hopefully, if they do end up really removing these menu options, someone will find a way to come up with a Chrome extension to do the job for those who want it. After all, after they disabled the Backspace button as a way to go back to the previous page, an extension quickly popped into the Store.