Google likes to experiment with a lot of things before they eventually roll out (or not roll out) updates to the stable version. The best way to check out these experiments is by using the Chrome Beta browser as that’s where they test out all these new things. For this beta update, they’re looking at new ways to “explore and share” using Chrome and you’ll see some changes in the user interface and design. This includes cards for past web searches, improved search results viewing, and even a “quote cards” feature so you don’t need to use graphics editing tools.
Currently, when you click on a New Tab, you’ll get just the links to sites that you frequently visit. With this beta test, you will be presented with “cards”, not just links, which can bring you to things that you’ve recently visited like a recipe site where you tried to look for new cooking ideas, a Google doc that you were editing, an e-commerce site where you left some items in your shopping cart. This way you don’t have to go to your browsing history or to bookmark hundreds of pages.
When you’re doing “research” on Google, you sometimes constantly go back and forth between the search results and the site you clicked on. With this experiment on Chrome for Android, you’ll get a a row under the address bar that will show you the rest of the results through links that you can just tap on if you want to move on to the other site. No need for constantly pressing the back button or opening links in new tabs until you have a gazillion tabs open.
Another interesting thing that they’re testing out is something called “quote cards”. When you find an interesting quote or text from a website you’re browsing, it will create a stylized image that you can share on your social media or keep for yourself. Long press and highlight the text, tap share, and choose “Create card” from the menu. There are even several design templates that you can choose from. The link to the article or site where you got it from will be included as a clickable link.
If you want to try out these new experiments, download Chrome Beta and type out chrome://flags in the address bar or click on the Experiments beaker icon. You need to enable the flags to start trying them out. And of course you’re encouraged to send feedback as they will use this to determine whether or not to release the feature on the stable version or to tweak some of the features.
