Google: No plans to remove Chrome’s ‘Close Other tabs’ and ‘Close Tabs to the right’ options

When you’ve a lot of tabs open in Chrome browser, you can close tabs to the right of active tab by selecting ‘Close tabs to right‘ context menu option and other useful option that helps to get rid of other tabs from the browser is ‘Close other tabs‘. You could’ve used latter the most. But Google has decided to remove both– former and latter — citing low usage.

The change hasn’t been landed yet, but we know search engine giant wants to make their chrome UI minimalistic, hence they may go with this. Meanwhile, here is a workaround suggested by a Google employee.

Workaround to close other tabs in Chrome

Click + shift-click + Ctrl-w

Select the first tab you want to close in other set of tabs, Press shift and click the last tab and use Ctrl+W to close all browser tabs.

Here is the context menu options usage data Chromium team has, this data has allowed them to take this decision. Chromium team feels ‘ They are useful in occasional circumstances, but not enough to justify the menu space’.

Duplicate: 23.21%
– Reload: 22.74%
– Pin / Unpin tab: 13.12%
– Close tab: 9.68%
– Reopen closed tab: 8.92%
– New tab: 6.63%
– Close tabs to the right: 6.06%
– Mute tab: 5.38%
– Close other tabs: 2.20%
– Unmute tab: 1.41%
– Bookmark all tabs: 0.64%

Users have only used CTTR 6% and COT 2.2%.

You can follow discussion on the bug here.

What’s your take on this change? Will you miss those tab closing options badly? Which one you use the most? Let us know in the comments.

UPDATE: Here is an update on this from Google side: For now, Chromium team isn’t going to remove the tab context menu options.

WE ARE NOT CURRENTLY PLANNING TO REMOVE CLOSE TABS TO THE RIGHT.

Maybe, some day, in the future, with more data and more discussion; 
so that shouldn't be taken as "this will persist inevitably",
only that it's not on the table right now.