Google Chrome is here to help you with your Christmas shopping

Google Chrome is here to help you with your Christmas shopping

If you've been dangerously late with your Christmas shopping, Google hopes to make panicked shopping a little easier by adding a host of e-commerce-friendly upgrades to Chrome in the near future.

In a blog post, Google announced that Chrome will be adding a host of useful shopping features. The most interesting of these is a price tracker for mobile browsers. If you're browsing products hoping for a price drop, Google wants to save you the trouble of refreshing the page incessantly by keeping track of prices for you. Products in the grid of open tabs will now show live prices. Here's what it looks like:

The feature is rolling out in the US this week on Chrome for Android, with an iOS version to follow "within a few weeks."

Then there is another mobile-friendly feature for the actual shopper: with Google Lens, shoppers can take pictures of items of interest and search for them on the spot. To do so, tap the Lens icon in the address bar and take a picture.

This feature will soon be available in the desktop version, although it is not very useful since it does not have a built-in camera and is not portable. When you find a photo with a product you are interested in, you can right-click and select "Search images with Google Lens" and use the mouse to draw a circle around the area you are interested in.

Finally, there is a type of bookmark for those who tend to add things to their virtual shopping cart. For those who do this and still forget where things are, the new updates to the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome are helpful. Simply opening a new tab will allow you to scroll to a new card labeled "Your carts."

"Some retailers like Zazzle, iHerb, Electronic Express, and Homesquare may offer discounts when you return to check out," Google teases. Again, this update is starting with U.S. shoppers, but according to Google, this is just the start.

Two other points in the post highlight existing features: automatic generation and storage of hard-to-crack passwords and storage of checkout details. All of these features prove why Chrome continues to reign supreme on our list of best Android browsers.

Still, it's a useful feature set for shoppers who prefer online browsing. And while Christmas 2021 may be a little late for most of us, we would imagine these features will be here for a long time. If you want to take your browser further, check out our list of the best Chrome extensions.

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