Disable Mobile Chrome 43's "touch To Search" Feature Programmatically

When I select text in Chrome 43 on my Android device I get the 'Touch to Search' popup. We're currently using text selection for a feature on our site and this new Chrome feature i

Solution 1:

This can be manipulated in a number of ways. The user can turn it off in flags as PaulI suggested, and you can control it.

Developer control, right now there are a couple of options but the basic summary is if we think it is an user interactable element then it won't be enabled:

• CSS: -webkit-user-select: none;
• HTML:
  • Anything with an aria-role will not have the touch to search enbabled
  • Anything with a tabindex of -1 or > 0

Solution 2:

Possible workaround could be to wrap text in <button> tag. This obviously wouldn't work if talking about big blocks of text, but for other elements like titles, icons and other small stuff this works fine.

Solution 3:

As of 2021, it isn't possible to disable touch-to-search (when this is triggered by a long-press for text selection) in chrome mobile. The article that Kinlan is referencing is apparently concerned only with touch-to-search triggered through a tap gesture.

Quoting donnd, from bugs.chromium.org:

Regarding #2 -- developer control: The 2015 article that you mentioned (https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/10/tap-to-search) focuses on triggering through the tap gesture. As you correctly point out, it does not address the long-press gesture triggering. Touch to Search responds to both tap and long-press but treats them differently. As I'm sure you know, the long-press gesture activates a whole set of features which can include copy, translation, smart text selection, and Web Search. A site developer can markup their page text as non-selectable in order to disable the long-press gesture entirely, but currently there's no way to disable only the Touch to Search response to long pressing. If you'd like to work with us to add such a feature, let us know and we'll file a separate feature request.

Solution 4:

If you want disabled "touch to search" in a menu that has an action open / close (toggle), it is necessary to javascript :

event.preventDefault();

Solution 5:

Navigate to about:flags or chrome:flags and look for Enable Contextual Search

Then toggle to Disabled and hit restart at the bottom.