Let’s be honest: The web browser is the modern-day operating system for everything from managing spreadsheets to pretending to work while reading tech blogs.
Google knows this. That’s why the Chrome team announced a trio of new productivity features designed for people who basically live inside their browsers. Best of all? They’re actually quite useful.
Here’s what you need to know to get your tab-hoarding, PDF-losing life back in order.
Split View
You know the drill. You’re trying to reference a document while writing an email, or maybe you’re watching a tutorial while trying to write code. You end up clicking back and forth between two tabs until your eyes cross.
Enter Split View. It does exactly what it says on the tin: It lets you view two tabs side-by-side in a single window. No more dragging and resizing windows manually like it’s 2004.
The feature is built into Chrome now, creating a single, organized workspace that keeps you focused.
Unfortunately, it’s not super obvious. To enable it, you’ll need to open a new tab, then right-click said tab, and select “Add tab to new split view.”
You’ll then have to select which of your open tabs to add to the other split-view pane. It takes about three or four more clicks than it should, but there you have it.
PDF Annotations
File this one under “Finally!”
The Chrome PDF Viewer has always been a handy way to look at documents, but looking was about all you could do. If you needed to highlight a line or add a quick note, you had to download the file, open a dedicated PDF application, make the change, save it, and probably upload it again.
Exhausting.
Now you can highlight text and add handwritten notes to PDFs directly inside the browser by clicking the little squiggle icon at the top of any open PDF.
This stuff isn’t as robust as Microsoft Edge’s PDF features, which let you enter typed text into form fields as well. But it’s still a tiny friction remover that’s going to save an unreasonable amount of annoyance.
Save to Drive
If your Downloads folder looks like a digital landfill of files named “Invoice_Final_V4(1).pdf,” you’re not alone. You download an important file, completely lose track of where your computer put it, and spend 10 minutes searching your hard drive.
To fix this, Chrome has added a direct “Save to Google Drive” feature. When you’re looking at a PDF, you can bypass the local download entirely by clicking the Google Drive icon in the upper-right corner.
Chrome will whisk the file away to a dedicated “Saved from Chrome” folder right in your Google Drive. It’s instantly backed up, organized, easily searchable, and available on whatever device you decide to pick up next.