One of Chrome’s newer features on mobile is the addition of the tab grid switcher. Most of the phones I’ve had lately (yeah, I go through quite a few devices) have all had the newer tab grid view that presents your open tabs in a grid versus the older style card stack that Chrome used to employ. This feature has been around for quite some time, but for whatever reason it is rolling out to users on what seems to be and account-by-account or device-by-device system. Either way, the Chrome tab grid will be the way you navigate your open tabs going forward. Well, eventually, anyway.
As a part of this feature, it looks like Google is also experimenting with a new tool that will help out in the upcoming shopping season quite a bit. According to the language in the recent and now-merged commit from the Chromium Repositories, Chrome will be getting the ability to detect and display the price of a shopping item on the webpage associated with any one of your open tabs in the tab grid.
Add price information to tab grid card
Where appropriate and available we display the price of an offer on a shopping website in the card in the tab grid switcher. The backend is not ready yet but the integration is in place and unit tested. The feature is behind a flag and will be able to be turned on via the flag UI when the backend is ready.
via the Chromium Gerrit
From what we can tell, this feature will allow Chrome to understand that the tab in question has an item for sale within and will allow it to show the user the associated price via a small info chip on the tab grid item. With this in place, users could ideally have multiple tabs open on their device, hit the tab overview button at the top of their Chrome browser, and see multiple prices for competing stores in a quick, seamless way. See the mock up below for an idea of what we’re talking about.
As we move into November and December, all of us will be shopping more than we normally do and will likely be doing so online more than we ever have before. Thanks to an ongoing pandemic and the likelihood that we’ll see a surge in cases as the weather changes, online shopping will be booming this year as we finalize 2020. Tools like this could end up helping everyone be a bit more productive in the process if Google can get this out the door soon. The next update to Chrome is set for early November, so it will be interesting to see if Google can get this feature rolled out by then so it can actually be of use during the busiest online shopping season we’ve ever seen.
