Chrome for Android will soon help you multitask with PiP web links inside apps

Chrome’s custom tabs were added to Android back in 2020 as a way to give app developers and users the ability to customize the browser experience within a specific app. This feature allows users to open web pages within the application without having to switch to a separate browser or use the old WebView method. However, even with the added convenience of having all the features of a full browser available within apps like X or Slack, for example, there were still some caveats when you wanted to still have access to the original post. Once you opened a web link within the app, you were stuck in that view, and the only way to see the original post again was to pull out of the web page. That will soon change. A new experimental flag has appeared in Chrome for Android which Mishaal Rahman and Artem Russakovskii noticed. A flag called “Allow custom tabs to be minimized” allows you to minimize the webpage that loads within the app after clicking a link, displaying it as a small overlay at the bottom of the screen, in a picture-in-picture style. This view allows you to scroll back and forth through web content without completely leaving the original post.

This feature can currently be enabled in the stable version of Chrome for Android by going to chrome://flags and searching for the #cct-minimized tag. However, we don’t recommend doing this unless you’re an experienced user (or brave), simply because enabling experimental flags can sometimes break features, cause crashes, or cause other browser issues.

Having said that, Chrome for Android Beta already has this feature turned on by default. It became available with version 122 and is currently on version 123. The stable version of Chrome for Android is version 122, so we shouldn’t have to wait long for this to become a standard feature for all users.