Touch Drag and Drop Comes to Chrome on Windows 11
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Google is enabling touch drag and drop by default in Chrome on Windows 11, with behavior designed to closely match how native apps handle it. This means touchscreen users can now move items inside Chrome with familiar gestures, similar to what they already experience in Windows 11’s own apps.
Until now, Chrome’s drag and drop experience has been mainly designed for mouse input. Touch users had to rely on workarounds or faced inconsistent behavior. With the new change, Chrome is adopting Windows 11–style gestures to make dragging and dropping smoother and more natural.
Google Brings Native-Like Touch Drag and Drop to Chrome on Windows
A quick tap and drag will now immediately start a drag-and-drop action. This makes interactions faster and more fluid.
Long presses behave differently, too. Instead of always opening a context menu, the menu will only appear if you lift your finger without moving much. If you start dragging after a long press, the menu disappears and the drag begins.
To match Windows 11’s look and feel, Chrome will also show a thumbnail of the item centered above your finger with a rounded border while you drag.
This change is the result of years of work. The original bug request for touch-based drag and drop in Chrome dates back to 2013, and the new implementation closely follows how Windows 11 apps handle it.
“Enable touch drag and drop by default on Windows… The features are behind the flags ‘TouchDragAndDrop’ and ‘TouchDragOnShortPress’, which can be used as kill switches, should any problem arise,” Google explained in a recent commit message.
For users, the benefit is straightforward: if you’re using a Windows laptop or tablet with a touchscreen, moving items within Chrome will finally feel as smooth as it does in native apps. Google is also keeping switches behind the scenes in case problems arise, but the feature is now shipping as the default.
That’s not all. Google is bringing back flashing scrollbars to Chrome, setting new security rules for AI features in the browser, and soon, you’ll be able to convert your tab groups into bookmarks. Additionally, the company is working on an option to make Chrome the default browser and pin it to the taskbar all at once.
