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We’ve all been there: you’re researching a new product or a complex topic, and within twenty minutes, you have 15 tabs open, three different search windows, and you’ve completely lost your original train of thought. Google’s latest update to AI Mode in Chrome is designed to solve exactly that by turning your browser into a side-by-side research assistant.
The update introduces a co-browsing experience that keeps your search context alive while you explore individual sites, effectively ending the aggravations of tab-hopping.
Side-by-side Discovery
The most immediate change is how links interact with AI Mode. Now, when you click a link from an AI Mode search result on desktop, Chrome opens that webpage in a side-by-side view.
This isn’t just about seeing two things at once; it’s about persistence. You can browse a retailer’s site or read a deep-dive article while AI Mode stays open right next to it, ready to answer follow-up questions about the specific page you are looking at. It turns the AI into a ride-along expert that helps you digest content in real-time.
Searching across your ‘Live’ Tabs
The killer feature of this update, however, is the new “plus” menu. Google is now allowing you to pull context from the tabs you already have open into a new search – similar to what you can do with Gemini in Chrome already. Instead of copying and pasting text from three different sources into a prompt, you can now:
- Tap the “+” menu in the search box.
- Select your recent open tabs (or even local PDFs and images).
- Ask AI Mode to synthesize, compare, or find patterns across all of them at once.
Whether you’re comparing hiking trails across three different blogs or trying to find a common thread in a handful of academic papers, the ability to treat your open tabs as a unified data set is a huge productivity win.
Creative Tools Everywhere
Google is also making its more advanced creative tools, like Canvas and image creation, accessible through this same “+” menu. This means that no matter where you are in Chrome, you are only a click away from generating a visual or jumping into a full AI workspace.
The update is rolling out now to users in the U.S. on both desktop and mobile. If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed by the vastness of the web, Chrome’s new AI Mode might just be the thing you need to stay focused.
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