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I would like to be able to disable, through JavaScript or some sort of HTML meta-tag, the tap-to-search/touch-to-search feature found on mobile Chrome which shows a banner at the bottom of the browser every time the user long presses/taps on a word in any text paragraph.

This Chrome feature is a problem for me because this contextual banner completely covers the toolbar in the web app that I am developing, which is fixed at the bottom of the page.

I've only found this question from 2015 which references this Google Developers article (also from 2015), but the proposed solutions do not seem to work anymore except CSS "user-select: none"; unfortunately, disabling user selection is not a solution for me since user selection is required for my web app to work.

I have also tried setting event.preventDefault() when the "oncontextmenu" event fires, which does disable the search toolbar when the user taps on a word, but not when a user long presses on a word, as far as I have experienced.

So far the only partial "solution" that has worked for me has been to install the web app: as an installed PWA, tap-to-search does not somehow trigger. It still annoys me a lot that I would have to basically beg my potential users to install the web app on mobile.

I also know that the user can manually disable this feature globally in the Chrome Flags, but this is, I imagine, really annoying for a potential user as well.

Is there anything I am missing here? Do you know of any way to prevent tap-to-search from firing on a long press?

lorenzorapetti
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  • I bookmarked your question because I have the same requirement and if I find an answer I'll come back and let you know. – Billy Back Bedroom Sep 04 '20 at 17:06
  • @BillyBackBedroom thanks a lot! I haven't found a solution yet...fingers crossed. – lorenzorapetti Sep 05 '20 at 18:20
  • I did discover that if you use `contenteditable=true` and `inputmode=none` on an element, you don't get a keyboard but you do get selectable text and no Google snoopy search box. With the right event traps it you might be able to get a contenteditable to act readonly... – Billy Back Bedroom Sep 12 '20 at 09:03

2 Answers2

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Adding the attribute tabindex="-1" to the <body> tag works for me.

Trever Thompson
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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 Google Developers article 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.

Graham Leach-Krouse
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