When I'm reading an article or checking a page and notice a link that seems interesting, my default behavior is to tap and hold to open it in a new tab. I'm likely not yet done with the page I'm still on, and I don't know if the upcoming content will be worth leaving it for, so the separate tab solves that issue. A new behavior in Chrome might be more interesting though, as the browser is testing a "Sneak peek" feature that lets you load a link in an overlay without leaving the current tab.

While the feature appears to be enabling itself randomly for some users, you can manually trigger it by going to chrome://flags/#enable-ephemeral-tab (copy and paste that, linking to it doesn't work) and changing it to Enabled. This flag is showing up for us on both Chrome Canary and Dev, but not on stable.

Once Chrome restarts, any link you tap and hold on in a page will offer a *New* Sneak Peek option in the contextual menu. Choosing that will load the page in an overlay at the bottom while you continue to read. You can swipe up on the overlay to expand it to about 80% of the page, then scroll and read everything you want. Dragging it down slowly brings it back to its overlay state, while swiping down quickly will dismiss it. There's also a close button if you prefer to use that.

It's all quite smooth and provides an alternative to opening links in new tabs only to have them pile up, unchecked, until you forget where you got to them from and why you wanted to read them in the first place. However, the one negative I noticed is that I can't expand a sneak peek'ed link to a full tab (or at least I can't find a way to do so). That would be neat when the link turns out to be interesting and I want to quickly switch it to a tab.