Chrome for Android and iOS has been showing you article suggestions as part of its Discover feed on the new tab page for ages, and now, desktop Chrome is in for a similar treatment. As discovered by 9to5Google, Google has started rolling out various kinds of cards that help you continue browsing for recipes and products. Luckily, you can easily deactivate these cards if you don’t see value in them.
Google describes the cards as useful tools that help “pick up where you left off.” So far, we’ve spotted four kinds of these collections: One to “continue your search” populated with shopping results, another with recipe ideas, one for your carts, and a section comprised of recently edited items from your Google Drive. 9to5Google additionally found another entertainment card that shows you “top picks for you,” like TV shows you might have recently searched for.
So far, the cards haven’t rolled out too widely, and luckily, it’s pretty simple to deactivate them altogether if you don’t like them. Just hit the Customize Chrome button in the bottom right corner of the new tab page, head to Cards in the sidebar, and either choose to hide all cards or toggle on and off a few specific categories. You can also achieve the same by hitting the overflow menu (⋮) in the top right corner of a card and selecting “Don’t show [these suggestions].” (That’s similar to how you get rid of the Discover feed in Chrome for mobile.)
If you’d like to see what these cards look like before the rollout reaches you, you can also activate them by toggling on chrome://flags/#ntp-modules. You can additionally select specific cards you’d like to try by enabling the following flags:
- chrome://flags/#ntp-drive-module
- chrome://flags/#ntp-recipe-tasks-module
- chrome://flags/#ntp-shopping-tasks-module
- chrome://flags/#ntp-chrome-cart-module
It’s possible to populate all but the Drive module with fake data if you’d just like to see what the interface looks like.
The company previously announced some of these efforts. During Google I/O, it showed off the shopping cards that save your carts and help you continue previous searches. If you opt in, you can also get Google to alert you about discounts on stuff you’ve added to your carts on various websites.
You can see these new cards as helpful agents making it easy to continue previously started searches or as yet another means to help Google sell advertisements and make money, with the Google Drive shortcut being the only genuinely useful one. At least Google makes it easy to decide if you want to use the suggestions or not with the simple toggles on the new tab page.
The cards are slowly rolling out in Chrome 91 across Chrome OS, Mac, Windows, and Linux.
