Google Chrome is getting a “Read Later” feature to save tabs for later

How often do you come across an article that you want to read but save for later? I do it often but I’m yet to figure out the perfect way to actually go back and read saved articles. There are many different ways to approach this — you can save the article as a bookmark, add it to your Notes or Sticky Notes apps, save it in an email draft, etc. All of these experiences are not as smooth as native options can be. But if you use Chrome as your primary browser — like nearly two-thirds of the world’s internet-browsing population does, you will soon be able to enjoy a native menu option to save links and revisit them later. Google recently added a commit to the Chromium Gerrit, suggesting a “Read Later” could soon be added behind a Chrome flag. 

As per the flag description, a new button for “Read Later” will appear when you enable the flag. The button will let you access a menu with all the tabs saved for later. We don’t know how the feature looks or actually functions since it’s not yet available for Chrome, including the latest Chrome Canary i.e. version 86.0.4213.0.

Among the main reasons that make this feature desirable is Chrome’s hunger for RAM. When you can feel Chrome hogging up on RAM and making your computer slower, leaving a bunch of tabs in the background appears like the least desirable option. Besides resolving the need to save links for later, Google is also working on reducing the RAM consumption by the Chrome browser.

Until the Chrome flag goes live, you can check out an interesting Chrome extension named LINER that can be used to save links or excerpts from articles. Using LINER, you can also highlight parts of an article so you don’t have to rummage through the entire text to find something specifically the next time you’re reading it.

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