Google Chrome And Microsoft Edge Will Prevent Drag Drop Files From Taking Over Current Tab

Browsers had behaved like a drag for a long time with dragging and dropping files. It will soon be a thing of the past thanks to a change in the Chromium source code.

If you happen to share files over the Internet through your browser, you probably already have this problem. You are trying to drag and drop directly from the file explorer to the online file upload service, and this is the tragedy. Instead of sending your file, the browser decided to try to open it in the current tab, which could cause the loss of your work on this page. This is a recurring example for sites offering to edit text, on a forum for example, when you want to quickly add an image, but the site does not offer this function.

This problem may well be in the past very soon if we are to believe a recent change in the source code of Chromium, the open-source project that is the basis of many browsers including Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

It is Eric Lawrence, a developer at Microsoft Edge, who announces on his blog this change brought to the Chromium navigators. He indicates that from version 85.0.4163.0, a change he made now allows the browser to open files in a new tab, instead of deleting the current tab. For those who really wanted to replace the current tab with the file, it’s still possible, just drag and drop in the tab bar, rather than on the page itself. A small white arrow has been added to indicate where the tab with the file will be opened.

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Eric Lawrence explains that if Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge will soon have the right to this change, Firefox continues for the moment to offer the old behavior, but the problem was indeed reported on Bugzilla 4 years ago . The older version of Microsoft Edge did not support drag and drop to open files.

He also mentions another case of painful shortcut. The “backspace” key used to return to the previous page, when there was no text to delete, and also resulted in the start of the work in progress on a page. This shortcut was discontinued around 2017 for Google Chrome, and Microsoft Edge quickly followed this change.