Google is, these days, releasing multiple AI updates every few hours. Following on from the creation of personalized images in Gemini, now the search giant is unveiling a new AI Mode experience in Chrome.
Now if you click links that AI Mode has presented you with, they will open side by side with your chat, all in the same browser tab. This will simplify navigation and reduce tab clutter – no need to switch back and forth between tabs anymore.
It’s also obviously easier to ask AI Mode follow-up questions in this setup. One example Google gives is searching for a coffee machine, getting some links, opening one of them, and then continuing the conversation.
Or if you want to learn about “the different McLaren racing teams and how their pit crews train”, you can explore related pages like McLaren’s official site “without breaking your flow”. Google says people who tested this before it went live found that “having both Search and the web side-by-side helped them stay focused on their tasks while exploring useful web pages”.
A new ‘plus’ menu in the search box in Chrome on desktop or mobile will let you search across your currently open tabs. You can select recent tabs and add them to your search, and you can mix and match multiple tabs, images, or files (like PDFs) to bring some context into your AI Mode search. Tools like Canvas or image creation are also available “wherever you see the new plus menu in Chrome”.
The bad news is that all of these updates are currently only available in the US in the latest version of Chrome. Google promises that the functionality will expand to more places around the world “soon”.