I just noticed a new icon in the title bar of my Chrome windows, a circle with a down arrow in it. This is apparently a new, experimental "Search Tabs" feature.
According to this site I should be able to remove this by going to chrome://flags and changing the "Enable Tab Search" setting. But I can't find the setting on that page. Is there some other way I can disable it?
3 Answers
This issue is addressed in the Chrome bug reportIssue 1215708: Option to remove tab search.
This issue is labelled as "Type: Bug-Regression", which gives hope that making the icon "Tab Search" permanent may not have been intentional, so there is still hope for the future.
Your best option is voting for this issue and waiting.
If you are on Windows, you may switch to Microsoft Edge, which is almost identical to Chrome, but doesn't have this feature.
3The "down arrow" search came out in April. At this point (June) it is not really experimental any more.
For many people, the feature cannot be disabled (I think that includes you and me).
For fewer people, it can be disabled.
In another month (just say), it will be made permanent. It seem quite out of the way if you do not need to use it.
I suggest ignoring it.
You can also try / use Chromium Edge. It is much like Chrome fundamentally but still uses Find on Page for some of its searching
I find either way to be workable with no need to disable.
Aggregate data collection is very common so the exact method of search presentation does not really change that.
8Annoyingly this feature cannot be disabled in chrome not even in the beta. in the newest version it changes the icon when you change the flag.
From this (flag on):
to this (flag off):
Brave beta has an option to disable tab search that's what I'm using instead of looking at it.
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