AI Mode in Chrome Is Finally Making Tab Hopping Obsolete

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been researching something — say, a coffee maker for my tiny apartment — and ended up with 15 open tabs, trying to remember which one had the dimensions I needed. It’s a mess. Google’s new AI Mode in Chrome is finally addressing that, and honestly, it’s about time.

The core idea is simple: when you click a link in AI Mode, instead of replacing the search results or opening a new tab, the webpage opens side-by-side with the AI Mode panel. You can read the page, then ask follow-up questions without losing context. No more alt-tabbing back to Search to remember what you were looking for.

Let me give you a concrete example. Say you’re shopping for a coffee maker that fits in a small space and can make lattes. You describe that to AI Mode, and it gives you a list of options. You see one that looks promising. Click it, and the retailer’s site opens right next to your search. Now you can ask “How easy is this to clean?” and AI Mode pulls from both the page you’re looking at and the broader web to answer. You stay in one view, not five tabs.

The same applies to less shopping-oriented research. Want to learn about McLaren Racing’s pit crew training? Open their official site alongside AI Mode, ask questions, and keep digging without breaking your flow. Early testers — and I count myself among them — found this dramatically reduces the mental overhead of “where was I?”

Searching across your open tabs

There’s another feature that I didn’t expect to use as much as I do: you can now search across the Chrome tabs you already have open. On desktop or mobile, there’s a new “plus” menu in the search box on the New Tab page (or inside AI Mode itself). You pick recent tabs, images, or files like PDFs, and AI Mode uses all of that as context.

Example: I had five tabs open about local hiking trails, with different opinions on which ones were kid-friendly. Instead of manually cross-referencing them, I added those tabs to AI Mode and asked for similar trails in a different location. It worked. Not perfectly — it missed one trail that was mentioned in a forum post — but it got me 90% of the way there.

For students, this is a goldmine. Studying for a stats midterm? Open your class notes, lecture slides, and academic papers, then ask AI Mode for more examples of a tricky concept. It’ll use those tabs to tailor the response and suggest more sites to explore. I tested it with some old finance papers I had lying around, and it pulled relevant examples I hadn’t thought of.

What’s still missing

Look, I like this. But I have gripes. First, the side-by-side view only works on Chrome desktop for now. On mobile, you still get the old tab-switching behavior. That’s a bummer because mobile is where I do most of my quick research. Second, the “plus” menu for adding tabs is buried a bit — it took me a minute to find it on the New Tab page. Third, and this is a bigger one: AI Mode can sometimes hallucinate context from a page. When I asked about cleaning the coffee maker, it mentioned a “self-cleaning cycle” that didn’t actually exist in the product manual. Always double-check.

Also, the feature is rolling out gradually. If you don’t see it yet, check your Chrome flags or wait for the update. I’m not sure why Google can’t just flip a switch for everyone, but here we are.

The bottom line

AI Mode in Chrome is a genuine improvement to how we interact with search. It’s not revolutionary — the side-by-side concept has been done before in various browsers and extensions — but the execution is smooth, and the integration with your open tabs is genuinely useful. If you spend any time researching online, give it a try. Just keep your bullshit detector on.