Chrome Cart update turns your new tab page into a central location for all your online shopping

When the new year came around, I discovered something called Chrome Cart – a new tab page module in the Chrome browser that would let you pick up where you left off while shopping online and decrease cart abandonment rates for eCommerce. Little did I know at the time that this new feature was not solely meant to be for Google Shopping. A new update to the feature now shows an Amazon shopping cart instead of the previously aforementioned Cart Foo and demo data.

This surprised me a bit – I thought for sure that Chrome Cart would solely be used to promote Google Shopping so that the company could begin to rake in the cash in place of ad revenue. However, due to the open nature of the Chrome browser and its desire to accommodate many users from different brand loyalties, it makes sense that Amazon is being supported. Actually, I wager that had I shopped on another website, a cart for it would also appear here on the new tab page module. Amazon only appeared because I had the developer flags enabled for it, and had just purchased something for a family member. Upon clicking the Amazon cart found in this module, I was taken directly to my Amazon.com shopping cart – sweet. Interestingly, I had already cleared out my cart and signed out, but the cart icon remained on my new tab page. My guess is that it’s simply a place for Google to allocate carts you’re using for later access, which is fine.

I went back to check out the Chromium Repositories for Chrome Cart information and was met with a new commit. This one mentions a consent card that will be presented to users who are attempting to apply rule-based discounts to their cart items! So, it seems that not only will your new tab page in the Chrome browser be a spot for shopping cart modules and eCommerce items, (not to mention recipes, documents, etc.) but it may also be possible to apply website-specific discount codes and coupons directly. Maybe Google will use AI and machine learning to scrape these discounts from other websites for you.

[RBD] Add consent card to ChromeCart This CL adds the consent card to ChromeCart that asks for users’ consent of the rule-based discount feature.

Right now the card is not showing and the logics controlling show/hide will be handled in a later patch.

Bug: 1196030

Chromium Repository

Believe it or not, this seems viable since Microsoft’s Edge browser already has this feature built-in! Being that both browsers are built on Chromium, and the development teams often cross-pollinate ideas and help one another by sharing code, I don’t expect it to be long before we see a discount coupon finding feature to show up in Google Chrome. This Chrome Cart module and commit seem like the perfect place to inject such a thing, don’t you think?

How would you feel about your new tab page displaying shopping items you’ve previously browsed? What about having the page be interactive with all sorts of other data? We’ve already seen other modules pop up for Google Drive, recipes, and more, so it’s clear that the company has major plans to liven up this unused space. I know a lot of people who literally just want their new tab page to display a simple Google Search bar, and others who use a new tab page replacement extension that adds a peaceful background, animated wallpaper, a clock, recently accessed websites and more. It will be interesting to see if these extensions will be able to overwrite Google’s additions or not.