Google Chrome's upcoming Memories feature will supercharge your browser history

[mood]

Google Chrome's upcoming Memories feature will supercharge your browser history

Prioritizing open tab and bookmarks over chronological results

 

 

Searching for websites you know you've saved or seen somewhere in Chrome can be a bit of a hassle despite the handy history overview, accessible via the overflow menu in the top right corner of the interface. When you search through it, it only gives you a chronological view of all the sites you've ever visited, without taking into account if a page is currently opened in a tab or saved as a bookmark. An upcoming feature is supposed to change that. It's called Memories and takes all these factors into account when you use it to search through your browsing history.

 

As TechDows reports, Memories is live in the latest under-development version of Chrome 92, currently in the Canary channel, and it's still a little hard to access. It only appears once you've activated a development flag (under chrome://flags/#memories), and you need to type chrome://memories in your address bar to access it. Once you're in, you'll see a page that looks pretty similar to the history overview, but with a focus on search. It recommends a few terms that you might be looking for, shows your latest tabs, tab groups, and bookmarks, and gives you a small selection of your Chrome history. Supposedly, this structure will remain intact as you start searching, potentially giving you more relevant results before you need to dive too deep into your chronological history.

 

Image: TechDows.

 

According to its description, the flag should be available on Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, and Android, but when we tested it on Chrome Canary for Android, we just received an error message when we tried to access chrome://memories. It looks like Memories is only available for desktops for now, but that might change before Chrome 92 goes stable in July. It's unclear if Memories is supposed to replace the current browsing history look, but we wouldn't be surprised if it eventually does.

 

 

Source: Google Chrome's upcoming Memories feature will supercharge your browser history

[mood]

“Chrome Memories”—an early look at Google’s UI update to History

The new view is hidden behind a feature flag that defaults to "off" for now.

 

 

Google seems to be working on a UI revamp for the traditional browser history interface, which it's calling "Memories." The new feature is only available in Chrome Canary, and it's hidden even there behind a developer flag that defaults to "off."

 

If you have a copy of Canary installed and want to check out Memories, the first place you need to go is chrome://flags/#memories. Once you've enabled the Memories flag, you'll be prompted to relaunch Canary, after which you can see the actual interface at chrome://memories/.

 

The new interface is clearly still in an alpha state, with a non-functional hamburger menu on individual entries, broken thumbnails, and so forth. But it's functional enough to give us a general idea of what it's all about—basically, replacing History's simple row-based, item-by-item log view with a card-based interface that groups activities by time blocks. This design also collapses repeated activity on a single page in a short time frame into single entries.

 

We've seen some sites reporting that Memories either prioritizes or groups open tabs differently than historical activity, but that doesn't appear to be the case. Instead, you'll likely see currently open tabs in the first card, simply because they've got more recent activity than older historical info. In the gallery above, you can see one card for activity within the last hour and a second card for activity occurring roughly one day ago.

 

We see similar grouping into cards when we try searching Memories and History for "ars"—Memories offers three cards on the first page of results, with activity one day ago, two days ago, and three days ago. This is in sharp contrast to the same search performed on History, which barely gets past this morning on the same search.

 

It's not yet clear whether Google plans to replace History entirely with Memories or just offer Memories as an alternate, potentially easier-to-navigate view of the same underlying data. For now, the Memories interface is available in the latest Chromium raw builds, which means we'll probably also see it in Microsoft Edge eventually.

 

 

Source: “Chrome Memories”—an early look at Google’s UI update to History