Copy a web page address (URL) with a QR code

QR code of David Leonard's website

It’s easy to open the same web page on a mobile device that is open in Chrome on a computer. Just copy the URL with a QR code

Suppose you have Chrome open on a computer and the web page address (also known as its URL – Uniform Resource Locator) is long, complicated, and quite possibly includes a load of non-alphanumeric characters. Here’s a fairly typical URL (of a Trip Advisor page of reviews of Clapham Common:-

https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g186338-d2328627-Reviews-Clapham_Common-London_England.html

Now suppose that you want to open that URL on a mobile device. What you definitely don’t want to do is manually key all that address into the browser on your mobile device. If you start thinking about the problem, you might decide to copy the address from the computer’s address bar and paste it into an email message that you then send to yourself. Good thinking. That is certainly much less likely to drive you mad than manually re-entering the address.

However, Chrome now has a very simple alternative.

You can very easily create a QR code that appears over your browser window. Then you can just point the camera of your mobile device at the QR code on the computer screen and, hey presto, the same page opens up on the mobile device. It’s very easy to copy a URL with QR code.

According to my quick research, all modern mobile devices should be able to scan a QR code just by opening the camera app and pointing it at the code. That didn’t work for my Samsung tablet, but I think it’s about five years old. Anyway, it worked without a problem after installing a QR reader app from the store and using that instead. There was certainly no problem scanning the code from the camera of my iPhone 11 or iPad.

Creating and displaying the QR code in Chrome is very simple.

  1. Click on the 3 dots to the top right of the Chrome window
  2. Click on the “Cast, Save and Share” option
  3. Click on “Create QR Code”

3 steps to creating a QR code of a web URL

 

A QR code similar to the one below will now pop up. You can just point your phone’s camera at this to capture it or take either of the options shown below the code (copying the URL’s address to the computer’s clipboard or downloading a copy of the QR code to the computer):

A QR code of a website URL

If you jump around between doing things on your computer one minute and mobile device the next, this could be a tip worth knowing.


Post icon (Featured Image) from Chrome

Screenshot from Chrome