Chrome may let you peek at website pages before clicking a link with this upcoming feature

First discovered by our friend Leopeva64 on Twitter, Google is working on something called Link Preview. Anyone familiar with an app that existed a long time ago called Link Bubble (unpublished from the Play Store in 2017, and owned by Brave Browser, apparently) will know exactly what this may end up looking and acting like before I even explain it, but its name also speaks for itself.

You’ll likely hover over a link in order to activate a separate pop up window preview (which may somehow be different from the link opening in its own Chrome tab as a full-fledged window), allowing you to get a better sense for a website’s contents prior to committing to it. This could both keep you safe and save you time.

Google Search already has something similar to this, where you can preview a link in web results before visiting it. Similarly, you can press and hold a link on Chrome for Android and get a slide up window that overlays your browser session, letting you do the exact same thing.

The proposed change would likely bring this feature to desktop Chrome, and could even let you preview the link in the browser’s Side Panel if you’d like. Of course, Leopeva64’s GIF is just him forcing a link window to open in a scaled window, and this is just an example of how it could work, but the final implementation could be drastically different.

My guess is that it will take the side panel approach, and that you may need to hold a keyboard key before clicking or right click and choose “Link preview” from the context menu (as shown in the Japanese screenshot for mobile). Still, this is a pretty cool feature, and I hope it makes it through development so everyone can benefit from it.