14 DAY TRIAL // Google is giving the finishing touches to another new Chrome feature that could become available to users with the next stable build.
Called Tab Hover Cards, this update basically introduces tab previews for Google Chrome, meaning that users can simply move the mouse cursor over a specific tab to see a small thumbnail of the website.
The feature has been around for a while in other browsers, but Google only started testing it earlier this month.
The original implementation, however, didn’t include the fully working tab preview, but only an early version that did not come with the actual image of the website.
But as spotted by ChromeStory, Google has recently updated the preview thumbnails, so the feature is now available for all testers as part of the Canary version.
How to enable tab previews
What I noticed during my testing of the feature is that the previews sometimes fail to load correctly and they lock to a specific page, so the same thumbnail is shown for all tabs.
This can be resolved by simply minimizing the browser, but of course, this is just an early implementation and further fixes and improvements are projected to be implemented as the feature advances towards the stable version of Google Chrome.
If you want to see the new feature at work, you can try it yourselves by heading over to the chrome://flags screen in Google Chrome and searching for Tab Hover Cards. Enable the flag, reboot the browser, and that’s pretty much it.
The next version of the browser is Chrome 74, scheduled to hit the stable channel on April 23. This means Google has a little over a month to finalize this feature, so there’s a good chance it will be part of this update. For the time being, however, anyone can try it using the Canary version.