Google Chrome is picking up a useful update to a key web function

Copy-pasting is a familiar task for every single web user. You’ve probably done it a few times today already. For as long as we can probably remember, pasting copied content onto certain web apps like Google Docs or Sheets in your browser has been somewhat sluggish. That is becoming a thing of the past thanks to a joint effort by Google and Microsoft.

Known as “Selective format read,” this update is already live in version 149 of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge, according to the Chrome Developer Blog. This feature update for web browsers is designed to eliminate delays when pasting from the clipboard. More importantly, this will be enabled by default for all users, with no manual intervention required (via PiunikaWeb).

Before we get into the fix itself, it’s worth bearing in mind how pasting from the clipboard currently works. Imagine you’ve copied a paragraph of text and want to paste it into a word processing app. Although you may want to paste it in plain text, the clipboard itself will grab every single data type you’ve copied, including images and other RAM-heavy formats.

“The larger the unused payload, the longer the user had to wait, and the more memory the tab consumed, right when paste responsiveness matters most,” Google explains in the blog post.

With the introduction of Selective format read, however, Google says the browser now asks, “what is in the clipboard?” rather than immediately gathering all the data from the clipboard. The web app then tells the browser that it requires a specific data type (such as plain text or HTML), and only the required content is pasted.

Selective format read basically ignores other data types that may have bloated your browser’s memory and chooses which data to bring over based on the web app’s requirements. Among the benefits of this move are freeing up browser memory for other tasks and faster pasting, with Google adding that all websites automatically get this benefit.

While Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge are now covered, Google says Mozilla has expressed interest in following suit, while Apple’s Safari already has a similar framework in place.