Disclaimer: This is, at best, an educated guess based on a few bits of code that I spotted today in Chromium Gerrit. The confidence level is LOW on this prediction.

Now that the disclaimer is out our way, let me show you what I found today.

Price information to tab grid card

A code change request that I spotted today in on the Chromium Gerrit website refers to adding “price information” to the tab card.

Here is what the tab grid looks like now:

Google has also added “trending search suggestion chips” to this new design. Now, Google wants to bring in one more thing.

Price information and offers from shopping websites.

Here is how the code change request explains this feature (?):

“Where appropriate and available we display the price of an offer on a shopping website in the card in the tab grid switcher. The backend is not ready yet but the integration is in place and unit tested. The feature is behind a flag and will be able to be turned on via the flag UI when the backend is ready.”

We might soon see an experimental flag that we can use to test this feature. However, for now, we only have some code comments to review.

I could see future work planned for supporting all currencies, in the code. However, here is the most interesting bit:

The team is wondering if they should regularly connect to the shopping website so that the price stays up to date on the Chrome new tab page, or should they use a “push” method so that websites can send that information whenever there is a change.

Conclusion

It is too early to say if this feature will be considered advertisement on Google Chrome. Would you call it an advertisement?

If these suggestions are going to be based on my search history, it could turn out to be useful. However, I wouldn’t argue with you if you say it sounds a bit creepy.

Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. I would really love to hear your take on this new feature.

Wait, is this really a feature?

Source: Chromium Gerrit.