Google is currently trialing a new AI experiment named Disco: a Gemini-powered system that can transform the chaos of your open browser tabs into custom web apps in mere seconds. Its first feature, GenTabs, tracks what you’re researching across tabs and suggests interactive mini apps you can personalize with simple prompts.
What Disco and GenTabs Really Do in Your Browser
Disco watches your browsing-session context (sites and stories you are currently enjoying) and then compiles lightweight web apps for a tailored experience, directly to the task at hand.
Learning physics in a few articles? It can indicate a visualization for visualizing key messages. Organizing a vacation with multiple guides and booking pages open? It can make you a planner that combines schedules, budgets and checklists. Working through recipe blogs? There will be a meal planner that scrapes ingredients out and spits back a shopping list.
The apps are generated on the fly using Gemini 3, based on the content of your tabs and, if you wish, your previous Gemini chat history. Once you have built a first draft of the app, continue on with natural language—add a filter, change the layout, include a summary or plug in another source. Generated objects link back to the original pages, which allows traceability for users to double-check your submission.
How It Works Under the Hood for Generating Apps
GenTabs blends retrieval and generation. It detects what you are trying to do from your active tab set, retrieves related snippets and metadata, then creates a simple front end (often with just a table, interactive chart, checkbox or form) that is fueled by Gemini 3. Being able to access multiple tabs, not just the current page, GenTabs can synthesize across sources and cut out the copy-paste-discover shuffle that processes research-heavy tasks.
This is a marked departure from the usual “ask an AI side panel a question” model. And rather than merely summarizing or answering, Disco makes an artifact you can use: a discrete, focused, little web app that sticks around while you keep reading and changes as your context does. You can think of it as a low-code builder that doesn’t even require any code.
Why It Matters When You’re Browsing with Many Tabs
So much of knowledge work now takes place on the browser — too much, in my opinion. StatCounter puts Chrome at nearly two-thirds of the global desktop browser market, the obvious platform for launching AI features that wean people off how they used to gather and act upon information. By turning tab overload into task-specific tools, Disco hopes to condense workflows that currently bounce among notes apps, spreadsheets and chatbots.
It also sets Google apart from AI-first browsers and comrades. The editor of Perplexity’s Comet and OpenAI’s browser pair underline AI-driven search and summarization. Microsoft Copilot in Edge brings drafting and page analysis to a sidebar. The angle for Disco is artifact creation—creating little apps as they’re needed from the conversation flow. If this approach works out, the browser isn’t so much a place you go to as it is a kind of app farm.
Real-World Examples of Disco and GenTabs in Action
One graduate student might, with Disco, transform several journal tabs into a live matrix that tracks study findings, methods and citations — and then ask Disco to visualize effect sizes.
A sales rep scoping out prospects across company websites and filings might create a lightweight deal tracker filled with revenue ranges and key contacts scraped from open pages.
A parent juggling camp possibilities could make a comparison app with dates, prices and wait-list status, then export a shortlist that is color-coded by the factors in spreadsheet format.
Since GenTabs links to sources, it’s easy to verify and audit—important for instances like homework, budgeting, or trip planning where errors can snowball fast.
Privacy and Reliability Considerations
Using browsing context to build apps brings the same questions about data handling and consent that we’ve been dealing with all this time. According to Google, Disco cites your open tabs and, if activated, your Gemini chat history as references when generating a response. They might need more clear controls in enterprise deployments — what tabs are scannable, how long derived context persists, how we store or share outputs. Like any generative system, hallucinations are always possible hazards, so source links and transparent prompts serve as critical guardrails.
Availability and Next Steps for Google’s Disco and GenTabs
Disco is debuting in an exclusive trial via Google Labs, with early access made available on macOS through a waitlist. In a blog post, Google says GenTabs is the first feature in a bigger Disco roadmap, and any successful ideas could graduate to become larger products. Early user reactions could determine how much control people will get over data access, how apps get saved or shared and whether Disco adds plug-ins for services like Docs, Sheets and Calendar.
The larger signal: Google wants to make the browser not only a window onto the web but also a canvas on which task-specific software assembles like Legos. If Disco can consistently turn the multi-tab chaos of intent into functioning mini apps, it might even change how broadband-heavy browsing works on a day-to-day basis while making the process less passive-reader, more active (without having to pop open an IDE and futz around).
