“Focus Tab” a feature flag that showed up many moons ago is finally working in the Canary version of Chrome.

Focus Tab

When enabled, this lets you right on a tab and switch that into a separate window with minimal UI. You basically have the whole window for the website.

Here is a GIF demo:

This mode is really useful if you are reading a newspaper or writing something online.

It is simple, and I hope that it stays that way, without any additional bells and whistles (aka features)

What do you think you will use this mode for? Let me know in comments!

How to Enable Focus Tab

Focus Mode is currently available as a flag that you can enable from chrome://flags.

If you are on Dev or Beta channels, you might get this new flag in a few weeks.

Flag Name: Focus Mode

Description: If enabled, allows the user to switch to Focus Mode – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS

URL: chrome://flags/#focus-mode

Enable this flag and restart Chrome. Now right-click any open tab to convert it into a “Focus Tab”

Tab Hover Cards

This is yet another feature that showed up in chrome://flags but made us wait and wait. The Chrome team was displaying the favicon on the website while they get image thumbnails working.

Tab hover cards are now available and working in the Canary version of Chrome. It is a bit slow, but this is the very first iteration that we are talking about. I am sure we will see things getting better during its journey through Dev and Beta channels.

I can’t really think of actual use cases for this feature, yet, so I’ll be happy to see your comments on this one too.