As the browser war heats up, Chrome is adding new productivity features

As AI companies and startups push their way into the web browser market, the world maximum browser, Google Chrome, is rolling a handful of new features. The company on Thursday announced the official launch of a trio of options, including Split View, PDF annotations and a Save to Google Drive feature, designed to deeply integrate Chrome with one of Google’s other online services.

Although these particular extensions are not focused on artificial intelligence, Google has already integrated the Gemini AI assistant into Chrome. The move comes in response to increased competition from artificial intelligence providers such as OpenAI and Perplexity, which operate in agent browsers. These so-called browser wars have pushed Google to be less stagnant in developing and releasing more consumer-facing features.

With Split View, multitasking in Chrome has become easier as the feature places two pages side by side in the same tab. This allows you to work on two web pages or watch a video while taking notes, among other things. To use the feature, you’ll drag a tab to the left or right edge of the browser window, or right-click a link and select “Open link in split view.” The tabs will automatically snap into place. When no longer needed, you can exit the Split View layout via a right-click option.

Another handy addition is the PDF annotations feature, which lets you add notes to a PDF or highlight its text from the browser. This means you don’t need to download the PDF and then open it in another application to work with its content. The option, a long time coming, could make it much simpler to perform basic PDF tasks like digitally signing a document, filling out a form, annotating a file or personal document, and more.

Finally, the new Save to Google Drive feature will let you save any PDF directly to your Google Drive account, instead of to your computer, where it might get lost. When you use this feature, saved files will appear in a Saved by Chrome folder in your Drive, making them easier to find.

Today’s update follows the expansion of Gemini and other agent features to Chromebook users last month. And soon, Chrome is ready to adopt another change first pioneered by its competitors: support for vertical tabs. (Tech-savvy users can even enable this option now, in an experimental phase, changing a flag.)

This redesigned way of organizing open tabs was one of the top features of The Browser Company’s first alternative browser, Arc, and now it’s in the AI ​​browser, Dia. By adding this feature and others, Google hopes to give Chrome users fewer reasons to switch.