Gemini comes to Chrome: What it can do now

Google is importing Gemini right into Chrome, transforming the browser from a passive window in which we view the web to an active helper. With Chrome accounting for about two-thirds of global web use, according to StatCounter, the stakes are high: even small improvements in speed or clarity could cause ripples to travel across billions of sessions.

The integration lands in two of the places that matter most to everyday browsing: a new Gemini sidebar for context-aware help, and an AI Mode in the address bar that answers challenging questions directly on the page.

The company’s aim, it says, is to make web work feel more collaborative, and not just faster — by summarizing pages, juggling multiple tabs, and soon enough handling routine tasks for you.

What Gemini in Chrome actually does for users

Open the new chatbot panel via the Chrome toolbar and you can ask Gemini about the page you are on — without having to copy and paste. It might distill an article into takeaways, weigh the pros and cons of a product or phenomenon, or explain jargon with examples. Imagine: a dense policy explainer boiled down to three bullets, or a technical doc translated into plain language.

Gemini is page and session aware — it’s able to extract relevant information from what you’re viewing. That goes beyond text: if you’re on a product page and a review, for example, it can show a side-by-side comparison. And if an hourlong tutorial video is up, it can hop you to the part of it that only kind of sort of meets your need, as in other Google service–linked integrations.

Under its hood, the assistant relies on Gemini’s long-duration memory capabilities, which are trained to remember sprawling pages and multistep tasks. That matters if you’re working with data that can’t fit neatly into a single search result, like research or planning or policy change logs.

A sidebar that speaks your tabs’ language across pages

Where Gemini begins to diverge from a solo chatbot is its cross-tab memory. If you are plotting a vacation with five tabs open — flights, hotels, neighborhood guides, restaurant lists, and museum hours — ask Gemini for an itinerary draft and it will compile across those sources, mentioning explicitly where details came from so you can verify.

This tab-level context also comes in handy for more mundane tasks:

• Rounding up key dates from multiple school emails into one note
• Comparing pricing tiers across vendor pages
• Distilling a table’s data into something you can share

AI in the address bar brings answers into the page

For Chrome, the omnibox is now a gateway to AI. Enter a question in plain language — “What’s the best mirrorless camera for low light under $1,000?” — and AI Mode can do a factoid answer accompanied by relevant links, as well as suggest follow-up questions to help you improve your search. It’s search, but in situ, and subtly tuned to keep you in whatever your flow is now.

Since it’s right in the address bar, AI Mode is designed for rapid pivot: glance at a result, tighten your criteria, request a comparison table, click through to source.

For complicated searches, which normally generate half a dozen tabs, this can save minutes from the hunt-and-gather stage.

From suggestions to actions: an agentic update is coming

Google says an “agentic” update is coming: Gemini will start doing things for you, at your permission.

Picture booking a haircut around your schedule or holding a restaurant table, or automatically filling out forms based on data that’s already showing in your tabs. Anticipate confirmation steps and clear handoffs, but the trend is clear: less tab wrangling, more outcomes.

Privacy and controls for Gemini features in Chrome

Google focuses on safety, transparency, and user control. You can review or delete prompts and responses connected to your account in Gemini Activity Settings, and enterprise availability is coming through Google Workspace with the company’s data protection commitments. Like all generative models, they’re capable of hallucinations: Chrome’s approach to this is that it suggests sources and offers citations as a prompt for reality checking.

Parisa Tabriz, who heads Chrome, has characterized the shift as a move beyond rendering pages to comprehending them and aiding you in doing something. The very practical result is that, in practice, the browser does become a productivity surface and not only a portal.

Availability details and the new AI browser race

Gemini is available for United States-based desktop users on Mac and Windows, with mobile availability and enterprise access via Workspace to come. Once you’ve switched it on, your screen should reflect the Gemini icon in the top right of your browser along with an AI Mode callout within the omnibox.

The move comes in the middle of an arms race to remake the browser. Microsoft has built Copilot into Edge. Atlassian has acquired The Browser Company, which hints at aspirations for AI-first browsing. Perplexity debuted, and You.com made Comet with an answer-first philosophy. With an outsized footprint in Chrome, Google’s bet on an integrated assistant could establish the baseline for how the next wave of web work is done.