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Google Chrome 86 finally brings Native Windows 10 sharing behind flag

Last week, we reported that Google Chrome plans to support native Windows 10 sharing capabilities in the future. Today, Google Chrome Canary has finally made it possible. Techtsp has noticed a new experimental feature called Web Share behind chrome://flags in the latest version of Google Chrome Canary v86. Enabling this flag will provide Chrome users with Android-like native sharing experience on Windows 10 and ChromeOS devices.

Description of the Web Share flag in Google Chrome Canary reads:

“Enables the Web Share (navigator.share) APIs on experimentally supported platforms. – Windows, Chrome OS.”

As we said last week, the Web Share API support is currently limited to a handful of desktop browsers such as Edge and Chrome. In fact, the new Chromium-based Edge browser partially supports native Windows 10 sharing even without having to enable any experimental feature flag, as part of W3C’s draft proposal. Do note that the development around Web Share is still in progress. So don’t expect this feature to be part of Chrome’s stable release before that.

How to enable the Web Share flag in Google Chrome

  1. Open Google Chrome Canary
  2. Open chrome://flags
  3. Locate Web Share
  4. Set the flag to Enable immediately using the drop-down menu
  5. Relaunch Chrome

Web apps on the desktop including progressive web apps (PWAs) will benefit from Web Share API, further allowing Windows 10 users to share links to other apps just like any other native app. Simply put, the Web Share API will provide websites and web apps with native sharing capabilities. As a result, websites can share links, text, and files to other apps installed on your Windows 10 PC, similar to Android.

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