If you’ve ever come across a link to a website that you want to save for later, and used an app like Pocket or Instapaper to save it, you soon won’t need to. As Google has just added the functionality into Chrome’s custom tabs which are being used by a number of apps right now – including Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. This means that if you come across a review that you want to read, but don’t have the time to do so right now, you can simply tap on the overflow menu and select the “Keep Tab in Chrome” option.
Basically what this does is it loads up the tab in Chrome in the background. So when you’re ready to read it, you just simply tap on the Chrome icon on your home screen or in your app drawer. This is basically the next step from the “Keep Tab in Chrome” option that has been available in developer and beta builds of Chrome already. In fact, it appears that the Chrome Dev build that was seeing “Read it Later” option, has seen it go back to “Keep Tab in Chrome”. The latest Chrome Beta build is seeing the change to the “Keep Tab in Chrome” wording as well. Since this is in both the developer and beta builds, it may change a bit before it lands in the stable build of Google Chrome in the next few months.
Unlike some of the features that Google adds into their apps and services these days, this one appears to be a great feature, and something that many people will likely use. It’s a feature that made apps like Pocket, Instapaper and many others, popular, and may eliminate the need for them in the future. The only thing that would keep users from using this feature a lot, is if they don’t use Chrome on every device they use (we’re talking tablets, smartphones, laptops, etc). If they use Firefox on another device, they won’t be able to retrieve that tab that has an article or a web page that they wanted to read later on.
