I often share Web page links on my iMac with friends. I like the share menu, but where do all those entries come from and how can I customize it? Specifically, I would like to remove the “Open in News” option. Help!
We’re long past the days when people used computers to do stuff. Now we all share everything we do, from the food we eat to the workouts we have at the gym to us standing in line at the airport or train station. It’s a social world, for better or worse. It’s no wonder that Apple added a sharing feature to MacOS across a wide variety of different apps and programs. Like so much in MacOS, it can be customized, but finding the right location isn’t always obvious.
No worries, that’s what I’ll show you in this tutorial, so let’s get to it!
ALL ABOUT THE MACOS SHARING MENU
I’m going to fire up Safari and jump over to the National Weather Service Web site for this demo. Here’s how that looks:
You already know the sharing menu, but many readers might not, so I’ve highlighted it above.
A click on Sharing – an icon you’ll find throughout MacOS! – and a menu appears:
This is the default set of options, and you can see that my Kiwi for Gmail app has added itself to the menu (without asking permission, but that’s another story).
Fact is, I’ll never open a Web page link in News as I don’t use News, so I get your request to remove that link. To do that choose “More…” as a handy shortcut to the correct System Settings…
CUSTOMIZE SHARING MENU ENTRIES IN MACOS
Choose “More…” from the sharing menu and you’ll end up in “Extensions” > “Share Menu“:
There are a couple you can’t disable, notably Mail, Messages, AirDrop and iCloud Sharing, but you can definitely get rid of some other menu items, particularly “Open in News”. Just uncheck it. Done.
I’ve left just the ones I think I’d actually use, as you can see below:
The result (no restart needed):
A bit better. At least there’s no “Open in News” option anymore!
CUSTOMIZE FINDER QUICK ACTIONS MENU
While you’re in the “Extensions” system settings window, poke around a bit too. One interesting area to check out is the “Finder” where you can add or remove Quick Actions menu entries:
How do you get to the Quick Actions menu in the Finder? Just Control-click on any file icon and you’ll notice in the resultant menu there’s an option labeled, you guessed it, Quick Actions. In any case, you’ve pruned your Share menu and that’ll be true across every app and system utility that utilized that feature!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Mac systems since the very first model! Please check out my extensive MacOS Help Library for hundreds of additional tutorials to help you be a happy Mac user! Thanks.