Cam Summerson hit the nail square on the head when referring to the new “hover tab image” feature in Chrome for desktop.

My New Favorite Thing I Didn’t Know I Wanted Cam Summerson via How-To Geek

In case you’ve missed the news, the Chrome team has been working to enhance the tab preview function for Chrome and now it appears that it is making its way up the ranks in Chrome OS.

What is Tab Hover

Open a couple of sites in your browser. Then, hover to tab for one of those sites with your mouse. Do you see the little box with the site title and possibly document title? That’s tab hover. Nothing new and honestly, not all that interesting.

However, for those who have a slew of tabs open or maybe have multiple instances of a particular site up in multiple tabs, this feature can come in very handy. It can help eliminate having to hunt around for the exact tab you’re looking for without swiping back and forth in the hopes of landing on the right one.

In its current state, the tab hover preview is helpful but only if the page you’re viewing has the proper site and document title info to display in the “hover” preview. The updated version of this feature will give you an actual preview image of the page making it quicker and easier to identify the page you want.

“Tab hover cards” and “Tab hover card images” are currently disabled behind a flag in the Beta channel of Chrome OS but they are easily switched on in the chrome://flags page. Enabling the former will simply change the look of the current text preview to a more Google-y material design look. The second flag will give you this wonderful page preview.

I’m with Cam on this one. It never occurred to me that this would be as useful as it has become and now, I’m not sure I would be content not having it on my Chromebook. If you’re in the Beta channel, it’s definitely worth taking a look.

For those not willing to tread out into the deeper water, I don’t suspect you’ll have to wait much longer. Hover Card Images already exists in the Stable version of Chrome for desktop. It’s still behind a flag but that could change with a simple, incremental update.

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