Phenquestions
Google has rolled out a new feature in Chrome Beta on Android, currently on version 42, that changes the link sharing functionality in the browser significantly.
You may know that you can share links in Chrome relatively easily. If you open the browser and tap on the three dots next to the url, you get the main menu of the browser which includes a share entry.
When you tap on it, Chrome asks you to pick a service that you want to share the url with. Available are installed applications, for instance Gmail, Twitter, Facebook or Pushbullet.
The selected service is opened afterwards with the link included in a new message on it right away.
If you try the same in Chrome Beta currently, you get a different result. If you select Gmail for the sharing for instance, you will notice that not only the url of the page you were on but also a screenshot of it are added to the email automatically.
The screenshot shows only part of it though as you can see on the screenshot of the feature below.
And that can be a problem. Probably the most pressing issue right now is that this renders several services useless as only the screenshot but not the link may be made available when you select them. This is for instance the case with Pushbullet but there are most likely other services that don't work correctly because of this.
The second issue is that this may be a privacy issue depending on what is displayed on the screenshot. Maybe you want to share the link to your online bank but don't want the recipient to see your account status or account name on a site you are a member of.
What makes this worse is that there is no option to disable the feature. While you are still in control, it means that you need to remove the screenshot manually from the application it was added to automatically before you send the message.
It needs to be noted that this is only available in Chrome Beta right now and that changes may happen to the feature. Maybe Google will add a switch after all to turn this off and make the feature optional after all.
For now, you are stuck with it and depending on the apps you use, may experience some broken share functionality when using applications on your Android device. (via Android Police)
