Chrome 54 for Android lists Google Now suggested articles on New Tab page

Chrome 54 is currently in the Dev channel and includes a revamped New Tab page on Android that lists recommended articles from Google Now (via Android Police). Enabled by default for most Chrome Dev users, the feature is quite useful and hopefully makes its way to other platforms.

The revamped New Tab page is enabled by default on first launch and gets rid of shortcuts to Bookmarks and Recent Tabs. Instead, there is a new “Recent bookmarks” section underneath the grid of frequently visited sites and below that is the new “Articles for you” list.

Ten articles are listed and are similar to the stream of articles found in Google Now. Article title, image, and the first lines are available in each card, as well as the publication and when the story was published. There is no option to load more articles, but cards can be swiped away.

Going into chrome://flags provides a bevy of options to customize what source is used to provide the list of articles. There is a ChromeReader that serves articles from your most visited sites and a “contest suggestion server” backed by Google Now. Interestingly, there is the option to either have personalized or non-personalized articles served to you.

If this features makes its way to the Stable channel, these options will likely be removed and just be associated with a user’s Google Now account. This flag does not seem to be available on other platforms, but could be quite useful on something like Chrome OS where Google Now is limited to weather cards and stock listings.