How to Change Edge Chromium Back to Its Old Copy/Paste Function

How to Change Edge Chromium Back to Its Old Copy/Paste Function

I thought I had lost it, because something felt off about the URLs I was pasting in to Lifehacker’s Slack the other day. Rather than appearing as regular URLs — something like https://skillet.lifehacker.com/6-tips-for-making-gravy-without-panicking-1845739196 — they showed up like this, with just the title and a link to the domain:

Screenshot: David Murphy
Screenshot: David Murphy

This is how the same URL looked when pasted from a different browser, back to normal:

Screenshot: David Murphy
Screenshot: David Murphy

As you probably suspect, Microsoft made a change in Edge Chromium so that copying a URL now defaults to copying the page title as a hyperlink instead of the raw URL itself. This affects both your address bar and hyperlinks you copy whenever you right-click on a link. (Obviously, I’m talking about Windows with this quirk; I haven’t yet tested this on macOS, but I suspect it’s going to be the same on either platform.)

I suppose this switch might be useful in some instances, but I much prefer being able to just copy a simple URL. While, sure, you can CTRL+Shift+V your way back to the old method to paste a URL wherever you want, that’s not very helpful if that’s the method you want by default.

Microsoft didn’t prompt users on which they prefer when enabling this change (sigh), but at least they gave us all a way to disable it. To get started, pull up Edge Chromium’s settings by clicking the triple-dot icon in the upper-right corner of the screen and clicking on Settings. Click on Share, copy, and paste in your left sidebar, or just drop this URL into your address bar and hit Enter: edge://settings/shareCopyPaste.

You’ll then see this screen, which defaults to “Link.” Change it to “Plain text,” and you won’t be bothered by Edge Chromium’s little quirk any more.

Screenshot: David Murphy
Screenshot: David Murphy

Maybe next time, Microsoft, give us a heads up when you’re about to make a change that screws up something as simple as copy and paste?


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