How to Change Chromium Edge Back to Its Old Copy / Paste Functionality
I thought I lost it because something was wrong with the URLs I was pasting into Slack from Lifehacker the other day. Instead of showing up like regular URLs – something like https://skillet.lifehacker.com/6-tips-for-making-gravy-without-panicking-1845739196 – they show up like this, with just a title and domain link:
This is what the same URL looked like when pasted from another browser back to normal:
As you probably suspect, Microsoft made a change to Edge Chromium so that when you copy a URL, it copies the page title as a hyperlink by default, rather than the raw URL itself. This affects both the address bar and the hyperlinks that you copy whenever you right-click the link. (Obviously I’m talking about Windows with this quirk; I haven’t tested this on macOS yet, but I suspect it will be the same on any platform.)
I suppose this switch might be useful in some cases, but I prefer to be able to just copy a simple url. While you can of course revert to the old CTRL + Shift + V method to paste the URL wherever you want, it is not very useful if this is the default method you want.
Microsoft didn’t tell users what they preferred when enabling this change (sigh), but at least they gave us the option to turn it off. To get started, open the Chromium Edge settings by clicking on the three-dot icon in the upper right corner of your screen and selecting Settings . Click Share, copy and paste in the left sidebar, or just put this URL in the address bar and press Enter: edge: // settings / shareCopyPaste .
You will then see this screen with the default “Link”. Change it to Plain Text and you won’t be bothered by Edge Chromium’s little quirk anymore.
Maybe next time Microsoft will warn us when you’re about to make a change that messes up something as simple as copy and paste?