Struggling to use emoji on your PC? This hidden Chrome menu might help

Love them or hate them, emoji have grown to become a pretty essential part of how many people communicate online, but they can be a bit of a pain to type when you’re not on your phone. Thankfully, you can enable an experimental feature in Chrome to give you access to an emoji menu wherever you are on the web. 

The menu appears as a context menu, which means that you’ll have an option to insert emoji more or less anywhere you can type text on the internet.

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Whether or not the website will be able to understand you is another matter entirely, but generally if the service has a mobile app that already allows people to use emoji, then it seems to work. We were able to use it to send emoji on both Twitter and the WhatsApp Web app, for example.

Unfortunately, despite some websites now being accessible by typing emojis into the URL bar on mobile, the context menu item doesn’t appear when you right-click in Chrome’s desktop address bar.

How to enable Chrome’s emoji menu

The emoji menu is an experimental feature, so don’t expect it to work perfectly yet. If you want to enable it, here’s what to do:

1. Type ‘chrome://flags’ into the URL bar to see the list of experimental features you can enable.
2. Use the bar at the top of this page to search for ‘Emoji’.
3. Once you’ve found the ‘Emoji Context Menu’, choose ‘Enabled’ from the box on the right.
4. Click ‘Relaunch Now’ on the bottom right to restart Chrome. Don’t worry, it will remember all the tabs you have open.

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Now bombarding your friends and followers with emoji will be as easy as possible. Just right-click any text box and select ‘Emoji & Symbols’ from the menu that appears. There’s even a little search box so you can quickly find the exact symbol you’re looking for.

Where do you stand on emoji − love or hate? Let us know @TrustedReviews.