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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?
423
asked Dec 07 '25 19:12
Adding the attribute tabindex="-1" to the <body> tag works for me.
104
answered Dec 10 '25 12:12
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