It’s common to open a link just to see if a page is what you expect, and if it’s not, click away quickly. But this takes up bandwidth and time, and thebest browsers on Androidare all about the modern conveniences. To that end, Google seems to be taking a page out of Apple’s book with a Chrome feature that borrows heavily from Safari for iOS.
Chrome researcher and Android Police reader@Leopeva64 on Twitterrecently uncovered Google’s plans for a new feature to allow users to easily preview webpages. APreview Pageoption already exists in Chrome’s long-press menu, but this new feature would function differently.
With a long press, users would be able to see what pages look like to make more informed decisions before opening them. Leopeva64 points out that there are a number ofcommits in the Chromium Gerritthat reference the feature, which would reduce the number of times users open pages they are not interested in, saving effort and bandwidth.
What is unclear is how Google will do this. For those who don’t want to read thelong documentfrom the tweet, the short of it is that three different approaches could be used to implement the Link Preview feature: Use the existing MPArch architecture, use multiple Webcontents, or have temporary windows and tabs.
The first approach would use the existing MPArch architecture, but this would require some changes to the API. The second approach would use multiple WebContents, but this would break the assumption that each tab has one set of WebContents (its own cookies, history, etc.). The third approach would use temporary windows and tabs, which would be a new concept but would not require any changes to the existing API.
The documentation explains that Chrome would pre-render pages in the background and that users would be able to interact with the link preview. Beyond that, we’re unsure about how the feature would work in practice, but if it’s anything likeApple’s peek and pop implementationin Safari, the preview would appear when long-pressing a link and then disappear when you lift your finger off the screen. Similarly, desktop users might be able to hover their mouse pointers over a link to show the preview.
There’s no timetable for when this feature might make its way to Chrome Canary and ultimately the stable channel, but we will be following its development closely.
