Journeys launches today, along with new Actions and Android widgets
Chrome’s constantly gaining new abilities, both on the web and your smartphone. Like Android, Google loves to surprise users with a handful of new features every so often, and today’s the day once again. Whether you’re browsing at home or on the go, Chrome just got a little more powerful.
The biggest highlight in today’s roundup is Journeys. This feature first showed up as an experiment back in October, though it was limited at the time to Chrome’s Canary build. With today’s launch, anyone running the latest version of Google’s browser can try it out for themselves.
Journeys is a relatively simple idea: a new tab built into Chrome’s history groups your recent searches and related sites into topics, so you aren’t scrolling through hundreds of unrelated web pages just to find a single match. It sounds like a great way to plan out your travel or view feedback and reviews on specific products while shopping online. This data automatically sorts itself based on how much you’ve interacted with specific websites, so as not to spit out a ton of unorganized data.
Google was upfront about its privacy policy for this feature when it went into testing last year, and it’s doing the same with its wide launch. You can delete individual items and clusters of activity, clear your browsing history within Chrome, and turn off Journeys altogether if you’d like. This tool limits itself to your device, saving nothing to your account in the cloud, though Google is exploring adding access across multiple devices in the future.
If you want to give it a shot, Journeys is available on desktop Chrome beginning today in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, and Turkish.
It’s not the only addition Google’s bringing to its browser. The company introduced Chrome Actions back in version 87, giving users simple text commands for performing routine procedures. Google highlighted a handful of new Actions now available, including:
- “Manage settings”
- “Customize Chrome”
- “View your Chrome history”
- “Manage accessibility settings”
- “Share this tab”
- “Play Chrome Dino game”
Finally, those long-awaited Android widgets are making their public debut. Although they’ve been in Chrome’s stable build for a few months, they required enabling a flag for access. Starting today, anyone can try out the new search bar — complete with shortcuts to a handful of tools — or even pin the classic Chrome Dino game right to their home screens. It’s as good an opportunity as any to finally beat your high score.
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