Earlier this week, Google announced a wave of new AI features coming to the Chrome browser. As someone who spends nearly his entire day living inside a browser, I was eager to get my hands on them. I’ve been putting these tools through their paces on my laptop, and while some of them feel like a genuine win, others left me scratching my head — or just waiting for the progress bar to move.
A quick heads-up, though: Many of these features are currently in early access. They are primarily available to those with Google One AI Pro or AI Ultra subscriptions, and for now, you’ll need to be in the US and set your browser to English to give them a whirl.
What do you think about Gemini's new features in Chrome? 1 votes I've been using them, and I love them. 0 % Don't have them yet, but looking forward to them. 0 % I don't care for AI features in my browser. 100 % I'm already using another AI-powered browser. 0 %
Gemini in the sidebar: The context king
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Screenshot
The first thing I tested was the new Gemini sidebar. Previously, if you wanted to chat with Gemini, it would pop up in its own separate window, effectively pulling you away from whatever you were doing. You could install shady third-party extensions for Gemini, but that wasn’t ideal. Now, Gemini lives in a convenient flyout sidebar that can “see” the tab you are currently viewing — exactly what my colleague Adamya asked for more than a year ago. This is a massive workflow improvement because it allows you to stay grounded in your current task while using AI as a research assistant.
To test its contextual awareness, I pulled up a page on Best Buy filled with Windows laptops. I asked Gemini a simple question: “Are there any laptops here that run Panther Lake?”
Gemini correctly identified that while Panther Lake chips — Intel’s latest and greatest — had recently hit the market, the specific Best Buy page I was looking at mostly featured previous-gen hardware. It even gave me a list of where I could find those newer chips. It was fast, accurate, and incredibly helpful for shopping. This is exactly what I want from a browser-integrated AI: the ability to parse the overwhelming information of a retail site and give me a straight answer without me having to CTRL-F through every listing.
Managing multiple tabs with AI
Rita El Khoury / Android Authority Screenshot
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