As browser wars heat up, Chrome adds new productivity features

As AI companies and startups push their manner into the web browser market, the world’s biggest browser, Google Chrome, is rolling out a handful of recent options. The corporate on Thursday introduced the official launch of a trio of choices, together with Cut up View, PDF annotations, and a “Save to Google Drive” characteristic, designed to extra deeply combine Chrome with certainly one of Google’s different on-line companies.

Whereas these specific additions aren’t targeted on AI, Google already integrated its Gemini AI assistant into Chrome. The transfer was made in response to the elevated competitors from AI suppliers like OpenAI and Perplexity, that are dabbling in agentic browsers. These so-called browser wars have pushed Google to be much less stagnant by way of growing and releasing extra consumer-facing options.

With Cut up View, multitasking in Chrome has change into simpler because the characteristic places two pages side-by-side in the identical tab. This allows you to work throughout two webpages or watch a video whereas taking notes, amongst different issues. To make use of the characteristic, you’ll drag a tab to the left or proper fringe of the browser window or right-click a hyperlink and choose “Open Hyperlink in Cut up View.” The tabs will routinely snap into place. When now not wanted, you possibly can exit the Cut up View format by way of an possibility discovered by way of a right-click.

One other sensible addition is the PDF annotations characteristic, which helps you to add notes to a PDF or spotlight its textual content from the browser. This implies you don’t must obtain the PDF after which open it in one other utility to work with its content material. The choice, a very long time coming, may make it a lot easier to do primary PDF duties, like digitally signing a doc, filling out a type, making notes inside a file or private doc, and extra.

Lastly, the brand new Save to Google Drive characteristic will permit you to save any PDF on to your Google Drive account, as a substitute of your laptop, the place it could get misplaced. When utilizing this characteristic, the saved information will seem in a “Saved from Chrome” folder in your Drive, making them straightforward to search out.

As we speak’s replace follows the enlargement of Gemini and other agentic features to Chromebook customers final month. And shortly, Chrome is poised to undertake another change that was first spearheaded by its opponents: help for vertical tabs. (Tech-savvy customers may even allow that possibility now, in an experimental section, by changing a flag.)

This reimagined method to set up open tabs was one of many flagship options in The Browser Company’s first different browser, Arc, and is now present in its AI browser, Dia. By including this characteristic and the others, Google hopes to present Chrome customers fewer causes to change.