Google could be removing at least four features from Chrome in the near future.
While that may look like bad news at first glance, most people probably won't even notice or care about it, since the functions that are going away are among the least-used ones.
Chrome Getting Scaled Down
As spotted by Techdows, Google is getting rid of four options in Chrome, namely "New tab," "Close other tabs," "Reopen closed window," and "Bookmark all tabs," all of which can be found by right-clicking on any tab on the browser.
These changes were seen in Chrome 78 Canary, which is basically a version of Chrome for developers, for those who don't know. For the record, the current stable version for the public is Chrome 76, and the beta version at the moment is Chrome 77.
The reason behind this is to reduce the clutter on the browser, something that developers have been asking for. They do have a point because the same commands can be carried out through other means, such as hitting Ctrl+Shift+T to reopen a closed tab.
A Long, Long Time Ago
Chrome developers have been considering removing these features all the way back since 2015, as evidenced by a thread on Chromium.org.
There, one dev posted the usage statistics for the elements in the right-click context menu.
• Duplicate: 23.21 percent
• Reload: 22.74 percent
• Pin/Unpin tab: 13.12 percent
• Close tab: 9.68 percent
• Reopen closed tab: 8.92 percent
• New tab: 6.63 percent
• Close tabs to the right: 6.06 percent
• Mute tab: 5.38 percent
• Close other tabs: 2.20 percent
• Unmute tab: 1.41 percent
• Bookmark all tabs: 0.64 percent
One developer notes that what should be measured isn't how often users use these options, but rather the frequency of users right-clicking on a tab to access the menu that contains them.
At any rate, users can expect these features to go away soon, and for the minority who uses them, they'd probably be better off getting used to the other ways of accessing these functions as soon as possible.
