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You’ll need Chrome Canary to check Memories – and you’ll need to enable an optional flag.
Jim Salter
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Memories certainly provide a more compact view than traditional history, collapsing activity on the same site or page in short intervals into single entries.
Jim Salter
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The search for memories of history also seems to be limited to a view of the book collapsed by the time sequence against a complete diary format in turn.
Jim Salter
Google seems to be working on a UI renewal for the traditional browser history interface, which it calls “Memories.” The new feature is only available in Chrome Canary and is hidden even there, behind a developer flag, which is “disabled” by default.
If you have a copy of Canary installed and want to check Memories, the first place you need to go is chrome: // flags / # memory. After you have enabled Memories, you will be prompted to restart Canary, after which you can see the actual chrome: // memory / interface.
The new interface is clearly still in an alpha state, with a non-functional hamburger menu on individual entries, broken thumbnails and so on. But it’s functional enough to give us a general idea of what it’s all about – basically replacing the simple, line-by-item view of the history with a card-based interface that groups activities into blocks of time. This design also restricts repeated activity on a single page in a short amount of time in single entries.
I’ve seen some sites that report that Memoirs either prioritize or group tab opening differently than historical activity, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Instead, you’ll probably see the currently open tabs on the first book, simply because they have more recent activity than older historical information. In the gallery above, you can see a card for last minute activity and a second card for activity that took place about a day ago.
We see similar groups in books when we try to look for “Burned” in Memoirs and History – Memoirs offers three books on the first page of results, with activity a day ago, two days ago and three days ago. This is in stark contrast to the same search in History, which barely surpasses this morning in the same search.
It’s not yet clear if Google intends to replace the entire History with Memories or just provide Memories as an alternative, potentially easier-to-navigate view of the same underlying data. For now, the Memories interface is available in the latest raw versions of Chromium, which means we’ll probably see it in Microsoft Edge as well.
Listing image by Donkey Hotey / David Carroll / Jim Salter