Soon, Chrome will remind you to close open tabs
What's the story
If you have a habit of looking up everything you find intriguing/confusing, we're pretty sure that there's a whole batch of open tabs in your browser. These tabs are like those personal things that you want to attend to but not right at this exact moment. However, the good news is, Google Chrome will soon offer a solution to deal with them. Here's how.
Feature
Recommendation to close unused tabs
As first spotted by 9To5Google, Google is testing a tab management feature for Chrome, one that shows a recommendation to close tabs that have not been touched in a long time. The capability automatically looks for duplicates as well as tabs that have crossed the threshold to become what Google considers to be "stale", it then shows them as 'tabs recommended to close'.
Working
How the feature would work?
From the looks of it, Chrome's tab switcher will show a reminder to review and close the unused tabs. Once you click on it, the feature will show all the tabs that the browser thinks should be closed, including the duplicates and the stale ones. They will be selected by default but you can deselect some of them before hitting the 'close' button.
Availability
Feature spotted only in Chrome for Android
The tab management feature has been spotted only in the Android version of Chrome, but we expect it to show up on iOS, as well. In the stable version of Chrome for Android (v79), it appeared as a flag that had to be enabled manually, but Chrome Canary, which is version 81, had it running by default.
Launch
Official launch timeline remains unclear
Having said that, it remains unclear when the new feature would be enabled by default in a stable version of Chrome for both Android and iOS devices. It is a major upgrade for the memory-hungry browser and could play a big part in keeping your phone from slowing down due to too many tabs being opened inside of Chrome.