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If you’ve ever used Google’s Discover from your home screen, ever browsed the news in Google News, or clicked on any link in any app that uses a Chrome Custom Tab, you likely know what a breath of fresh air this feature is for apps that need to surface web-related material without booting you completely from said app.
With Chrome Custom Tabs, you get to see a Chrome-rendered version of the site you want to read without leaving the app you are in, and though they’ve been around for quite some time, I still appreciate them quite a bit. Yet, there’s always a tad bit of a confining nature to Custom Tabs simply because they don’t stay open like normal Chrome tabs do once you navigate away. So, if you close that article you were reading, it’s just gone.
Say hello to Custom Tab multitasking
But that has all changed thanks to Minimized Custom Tabs. In a recent update to Chrome, we now have the ability to use a PIP (picture-in-picture) feature in Chrome Custom Tabs to minimize a tab and leave it floating on-screen for viewing later. And it is wildly handy.
Say you are on Twitter/X and you see a post that links to an article you’d like to read. However, you’d also like to see the comments on X for that post or maybe search for a few other sources that are discussing the same topic. Before, you would have to click in to read the post, choose to open it up in Chrome, return to X, and use your phone’s multitasking to bounce back and forth.
Now, up at the top of the Custom Tab, you can simply click the down arrow and minimize the website you were looking at and return to where you left off. When you want, you can expand that tiny window again, and it stays present no matter where you go on your phone until you close it.
As a regular user of Google Discover, I’ve already found myself using this feature pretty regularly. Again, the nature of information feeds means it’s easy to lose track of a site you’ve opened to reference when bouncing between apps. This new Minimized Custom Tabs feature greatly reduces that anxiety and allows you to basically pin an open Chrome tab for easy access later. And I absolutely love it.
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