Google Chrome is here to aid your Christmas shopping

Google Chrome is hither to assistance your Christmas shopping

(Paradigm credit: Shutterstock)

If you've left your Christmas shopping dangerously late, Google wants to make your panic ownership a fleck easier with a host of e-commerce-friendly upgrades coming to Chrome in the nearly future.

Per a web log post, Google has announced that Chrome will be getting some handy shopping features. The first and most interesting of these is a price tracking tool for the mobile browser. If you lot're keeping an eye on a product with an eye for a price cut, Google wants to relieve you incessantly refreshing the page by keeping tabs on the toll for you. Products inside your open tabs grid volition now display live prices, meaning you can jump on them when they're at their everyman. Information technology looks a bit like this:

Chrome price comparison for Android — (Paradigm credit: Google)

That feature is rolling out on Chrome for Android this week in the U.South. and will follow for iOS "in the coming weeks."

And so there's another mobile-friendly characteristic for people doing their shopping in person. With Google Lens, shoppers can snap a photo of the item they're interested in and perform a search for it right there so, presumably in order to do a quick price comparison before pulling the trigger. To exercise so, just tap the Lens icon in the address bar and take a photo.

Less useful, given the lack of built-in photographic camera and portability, the feature will soon be coming to the desktop version as well. If you find a picture with a product you lot're interested in, yous can right click information technology and select "Search images with Google Lens," drawing round the specific bit you lot're interested in with the mouse.

Finally, there'due south something for people who tend to add together things to their virtual shopping carts as a class of bookmarking. If you exercise this, but are as well prone to forgetting where, then a new update for Chrome for Windows and Mac is here to help you keep rail of things. Just open up a new tab, and you'll exist able to scroll to a new carte du jour labelled "Your carts" which should list everywhere you take unfinished shopping concern to nourish to.

"Some retailers, similar Zazzle, iHerb, Electronic Express and Homesquare, might even offer a disbelieve when you come back to check out," Google teases. Over again, this update is starting with U.s. shoppers, merely Google says that is only the starting betoken.

The other ii points in the mail service highlight existing features — auto generating and remembering hard-to-cleft passwords, and memorizing checkout details. All of these features prove why Chrome continues to sit atop our best Android browsers list.

Still, information technology'southward a useful gear up of features for shoppers who prefer to do their browsing online. And while it may be a bit tardily for Christmas 2021 for most of usa, yous'd imagine that these features are here for the long haul. And if you lot want to play a joke on out your browser fifty-fifty more, cheque out our best Chrome extensions listing.

Freelance contributor Alan has been writing most tech for over a decade, covering phones, drones and everything in between. Previously Deputy Editor of tech site Alphr, his words are found all over the web and in the occasional magazine too. When not weighing upwardly the pros and cons of the latest smartwatch, you'll probably detect him tackling his e'er-growing games backlog. Or, more likely, playing Spelunky for the millionth fourth dimension.