How to share the clipboard across Chrome browsers
Clipboards are a feature you can find on both desktops and smartphones. They’re basic and exceptionally useful for copying text as well as images and files. Often, users need to share text not just between apps on a single device but also between multiple devices. If you happen to use only Apple products, you can use the shared clipboard but, if you’re trying to share clipboard content between a Mac and Windows PC, you’re likely emailing or messaging yourself the snippets. If you use Chrome though, you can enable its new shared clipboard feature and share clipboard entries across Chrome. Here’s how.
Share clipboard across Chrome browser
This feature works with Chrome sync. It works on Windows 10, macOS, and Android. Chrome for iOS does not support the feature yet but it is in the pipeline. Make sure you have Chrome installed, and sync enabled on at least two different devices and make sure you’re running Chrome 79, or later.
Open a new tab in Chrome and enter the following in the URL bar. Tap Enter.
chrome://flags
On the Chrome Flags page, you need to find the following three flags. Open the dropdown next to each flag, and select Enabled from it. Once you’re done, click the Relaunch button.
- Enable receiver device to handle shared clipboard feature
- Enable shared clipboard feature signals to be handled
- Sync Clipboard Service
After you relaunch Chrome, open any webpage and select text. Right-click it and the context menu will have a ‘Copy to (device name)’ option. The Device name will, of course, be the other desktop or Android device that you have Chrome installed on. The device must be online i.e., connected to the internet though it does not need to be on the same network as the device you’re sending the text from.
Select the device you want to send the text to.
On the receiving device, you will get an alert from Chrome showing text has been sent. If you click the alert, the text will be copied to the clipboard and you can paste it anywhere you want.
This feature compliments the recent send links between devices feature that Chrome added. It’s an extension of the feature that is meant for sending links but unlike the link-sharing feature, this only works if the other device is also online. So far, text and link sharing have been covered. It may only be a matter of time before Chrome adds a way to share files.
As with most things related to the clipboard, we’re going to caution you about sharing sensitive information.
