Android already has a number of ways to stumble across new content, from the Google page in most app launchers, the Google home page, and even within Chrome itself.
Within just a few days of starting to use a new device, or even for a first time user, these content discovery methods become quite adept at finding content that you might want to read about. Some of it is clickbait rubbish, but quite often it’s a good way to keep your finger on the pulse of news that interests you.
Google is releasing a new way to discover content from these sources, introducing a new ‘Explore’ tab to Chrome’s tab switcher. Android Police reports that the new feature – found in Chrome Dev and Canary for now – is identical to that shown in Chrome’s New Tab page. Here’s how it looks:
If you want to try it out for yourself, install Chrome Canary or Dev and set #enable-two-panes-start-launcher in chrome://flags to ‘Enabled.’ You also have to set Chrome Duet (#enable-chrome-duet) to ‘Disabled’ and the tab grid layout (#enable-tab-grid-layout) to ‘Enabled’.
Whether this will graduate to a Chrome Beta or even mainline release feature is yet to be seen. Google releases many testing features into Chrome Dev and Chrome Canary which never make it to mainline releases, and given how many places already exist to find Google’s Recommended articles, this extra one – which so nearly duplicates existing functionality – seems a bit superfluous.
However, if you don’t actually use Chrome on Android, then you’re not going to see it in a hurry.
