Chrome for Android is testing ‘Suggest to close Tabs’, a feature you might not use anyway

Many of us have the habit of keeping multiple tabs open on the browser which mostly serve as reminders for things we need to do, but cannot at that very moment. And in most case, we never end up actually shutting any of them. For people like us, Chome for Android is testing a feature called 'Suggest to close Tabs' - a recommendation feature that will ask you to close some tabs though you actually might not even listen.

Since August last year, Google has been working on this feature that is exclusive to Chrome for Android. And like most other Google Chrome features, Suggest to close Tabs was initially hidden behind a flag in chrome://flags, reported 9to5Google, but one of their reporters found it enabled by default on Chrome Canary.

So what does Suggest to close Tabs actually do?

The features suggests to users to close tabs that haven't been used beyond a configurable threshold or where duplicate tabs exist. And this threshold is configurable.

This feature enables Chrome to take notice of the last time you opened and used the tabs that you have open on the browser and once any of these cross the threshold to what Google can consider to be 'stale', the browser will recommend in the tab switcher to close those tabs.

"Tapping the recommendation thankfully doesn't just close the potentially unwanted tabs, but instead offers for you to 'review' them. Any stale tabs are automatically selected in the review but can be easily deselected before tapping 'Close' to finalise your choices," 9to5Google reported.

Google has not finalised how long this threshold is going to be post which Chrome is going to identify a tab as stale. But going by the choices available via the flag, Google is considering periods of four hours or eight hours or seven days. However, if you come to think of it, anything less than a few days will turn these recommendations into a nuisance rather than a healthy reminder.

Right now, this feature is live in Canary and there is an option to manually enable it on Chrome 79. We'll have to wait and see what version Google actually decides to launch ultimately.