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If you’ve been in the Chrome ecosystem long enough, you probably remember the Chrome to Phone app initiative. It was one of the first attempts at unifying the phone and desktop browsing experience by allowing users to ‘push’ an open Chrome tab from your desktop to your phone.
The idea was simple: when at your desktop/laptop, you may be in the middle of something and need to head out. With Chrome to Phone, you could hit a button and that tab would open on your phone for on-the-go reading later.
As time has passed, syncing has become much more simple, automated, and unobtrusive. In the event you didn’t know this already, at any time you can simply click into the menu in Chrome (mobile or desktop) and see all your current tabs across all your devices. So, if I have a website on my phone, I can simply click the 3-dot menu, highlight History, and see all the stuff I have open in tabs.
The problem? Sometimes the sync isn’t fully up to date. It usually catches up in a few minutes, but there have been a few cases where I needed a tab open on another device and it simply isn’t there yet. Sure, its in my history if I want to dig, but who wants to do that?
A New Way On The Way
According to this commit – found by the folks over at XDA and Chrome Story – it looks like a new feature is coming to Chrome that will allow users to manually force a mobile tab to open up on your desktop. I would assume it would work in reverse as well, allowing you to also send the tab from your desktop over to your phone.
Allows users to post tabs from Android devices to allow other synced computer to reopen those same
The language in the commit isn’t completely clear, so we’re not sure if this will be a two-way street. It seems, for the time being, this is intended to send tabs from your phone to your desktop. We also don’t know if there’s more to the feature than what we’re seeing on the surface, either. It seems pretty cut and dry, but there could be some larger aspirations going on we aren’t aware of.
When first discovered by XDA, this new feature was being dubbed “Self Share”. It seems that the name of the service has already changed names as of yesterday afternoon and is now being referred to as “Send Tab To Self”. Clearly this entire thing is early in development, so we’ll keep an eye out for further changes and be keeping an eye on the flags to see when it might show up for some testing.
