Chrome ‘Memories’ will bring a new way to look at your browser history

Kyle Bradshaw | Apr 19 2021 - 11:21 am PT

One fundamental feature of the web browser is the ability to find sites you’ve viewed before in your history. Google Chrome is set to gain “Memories” as an alternative way to look through your browser history.

Chrome has long offered the History page as a way to search through everything you’ve ever looked at since the last time you cleared the browser’s data. As this page shows quite literally everything — including things like every time you change from one Slack room to another — things can start to get messy if you aren’t sure what you’re looking for.

Back in February, Google added a new flag to the chrome://flags page, vaguely describing the addition of “Memories” to Chrome. However, the flag had thus far not done anything noticeable to Chrome.

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As spotted by Techdows, the most recent builds of Chrome Canary and Chrome OS Canary — currently version 92 — include a functional version of Memories. By navigating to the new “chrome://memories” URL, you’ll be treated to a page that looks surprisingly similar to the current History view for Chrome, despite being titled “Memories.”

For now, Chrome’s Memories page only shows history from the current day plus four previous days, seemingly showing only the most relevant pages you’ve browsed on a given day, rather than everything. Atop each day, you’ll also see some of the Google searches you’ve done during that browsing session.

Using the search bar at the top of the Memories page, you can filter down to see only the pages related to your search, just like Chrome’s History view. Of course, unlike the History page, Memories only shows results from the last few days.

As can be seen with the obvious placeholder image in the screenshot, though, Memories is still very much a work in progress. This is also clear from the three-dots menu buttons, which currently do not offer any options when clicked.

It remains to be seen what else Google intends for this new Chrome Memories page to do. Given the name, it’s easy to draw comparisons to features like Memories in Google Photos, which surfaces pictures according to a category or based on how long ago you took them. Given the feature has only just begun working on Chrome Canary, we likely won’t see it launch until Chrome 92 — set to launch in July — at the earliest.