Google is releasing a new version of its Chrome browser beta today it’s introducing some pretty noticeable changes to its user interface and layout. The browser will present an updated New Tab page, which will now include cards that direct you to previous web search activities, rather than just a list of shortcuts to favorite websites. Other changes are intended to make it easier to navigate search results and to highlight and share citations from the web.
The update to the New Tab page will be one of the first changes that Chrome beta users will notice.
The idea behind this design change is that you can quickly return to previous web activities without having to dive into your browsing history to remember which sites you have been using for things like recipes or shopping. It can also help you quickly return to your recent documents list on Google Drive, a handy cross-promotion for Google services.
Image credits: Google
The page will now feature what Google calls “cards,” not just links, that could direct you to things like a recently visited recipe site where you’ve been looking for ideas, a Google doc that needs to finish editing, or a retailer. website where you had left your shopping cart full of things you would like to buy at a later date. The latter ties in with Google’s increased investment in online shopping, which has already seen the search giant trying to gain more market share in the space by making product listings free and partnering with commerce platforms. electronic like Shopify.
Google is rightly concerned about Amazon’s growing ad business, which is a big part of the “Other” category of the growing retailer. 87% year over year to generate $ 7.9 billion in the second quarter. Now, it’s leveraging Chrome’s New Tab real estate to boost shopping activity in hopes of nudging users to complete their transactions.
Another change aims to facilitate research on the web. Google says that often, users searching for something on its platform will navigate to multiple web pages to find your answer. The new version of Chrome will experiment with a different way of connecting users to their search results by adding a row below the address bar in Chrome for Android that will display the rest of the results so that you can navigate to other web pages without having to. pressing the back button.
Image credits: Google
A new “quote card” experiment, also coming to Chrome Beta on Android, will allow users to create a stylized social sharing image that features text found on websites. Taking a screenshot of the text of a website is something that is already a common activity, and particularly for people who want to share a key point of a news article that they are reading with followers on platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. With this new feature, you can press and hold the text to highlight it, then tap Share and select a template by tapping the “Create card” option from the menu.
All features are part of the Chrome Beta browser. To enable experiments, you can type chrome: // flags in the browser address bar or click the Experiments beaker icon and then enable the flags. The associated indicators for these experiments are the # ntp-modules indicator (New tab page), # continuous search (changes in search results), and the # webnotes-stylize indicator (appointment cards).
Experiments don’t necessarily turn into Chrome features that are more widely implemented. Instead, they offer Google a way to capture large-scale user feedback on their new design ideas, so that features can be tweaked and tweaked before a public release.
