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Google introduced five new updates for Google Chrome. The new Chrome address bar features — rolling out to all Chrome users in the coming weeks — help you find websites quicker, correct typos, make better suggestions, and search through bookmarks faster. They’ll be available for Chrome on desktop, Android, and iOS.
Improvements coming to the Chrome address bar
The first of these Chrome address bar features is smarter autocomplete. Until now, Google would only autocomplete website URLs if you entered the beginning of the website correctly. With the update, Chrome will surface website URL suggestions for any words you have already looked up. For example, if you browsed the books section on Amazon. You no longer need to type “Amazon.com books” to revisit it. You can write “books,” and the autocomplete will include Amazon.
Typo corrections are also more intelligent now. Chrome will show corrected URL suggestions for misspelled addresses. So if you type “amzon.com”, Google will understand that you meant “amazon.com” and suggest the correct URL. But the feature is limited to your previously visited websites. It may not fix the typos for websites that aren’t in your history.
But Chrome can now suggest URLs for popular sites, even if you have never visited them. The new update allows Chrome to autocomplete addresses, even if you have never visited the website or mistyped its URLs. The official blog post specifies that it only works for popular websites, so it’ll work for Amazon Prime but not a niche, underground website.
The next feature is smarter bookmark search on Chrome. Previously, you had to include the folder name when searching for a bookmark nested in a folder. So for Amazon.com, you would have to include the folder keyword like “Shopping”. Starting now, you can search your bookmark folders without including the collection’s name.
Overall, Google has further streamlined the address bar to make the results readable and scannable. The new layout not only loads suggestions faster it also highlights them better.
The new updates will save time
Although these improvements are subtle when considered by themselves, together, they shave off precious seconds from each search. The smarter autocomplete suggestions for URLs are the most significant upgrade since it adapts to how people intuitively surface results. These aren’t the only address bar updates Google has in store. Chrome might also relocate the address bar for mobile users.