Everyone is getting their bush in a wad over Chrome removing the "save image" option when you right-click. I think it's just Chrome's effort to push more people to look into programming and web development. It's a little under-hand coercion, if you will.
This feature goes back as far back as the 90s. Many websites added a little Javascript snippet to disable right-click on their sites. That shit was all the rage to protect copyright. It's funny to me that this is another instance of history repeating itself. Even bad ideas from old history crop their heads back up, unfortunately.
You can still get at the images
Chrome hasn't somehow magically changed the internet to stop you from getting at images. It's a feature that's been removed on only their browser. The same old http protocol is, well, the same as always. That means every image on the site is still getting downloaded on the client-side (i.e. in your browser) with every page load. So it's really a matter of finding an alternate way of downloading those images.
Thankfully, Google has still left the "inspect element" option in the right click menu. Seriously, all you have to do is click "inspect element." Then the developer tools console will open up. When you do that, it will show the URL path that loads that image. It will either be in the larger html panel in an < img > tag, or it will be in the CSS panel (such as in the background-image property). All you have to do is right-click on that link. Then the familiar "save image" option shows up!
Unexpected outcome?
Wow, Google added one extra click and now everywhere gets to see the guts of the website when they want to rip off some pepe meme.
I hope a few more people will be like, "Woah, what's this html and css on my screen." Then they'll research it more and find that this is the backbone of the web. Even better, they may even want to try their hand at developing websites. I see Utopia because of efforts to get around copyright. It may be a boon to the industry!
Resources
- Chrome guide for using the element inspector
- More in-depth technical guide
- Screenshot in action:
.png)