Google is working on a new feature for Chrome’s New Tab Page that shows advertisements on shopping based on your browsing activity on Google services. Currently, the feature is behind flags in Canary and you can here see a glimpse of what coming to the new tab in Chrome.
Is Google trying to turn New Tab Page one central hub to show shopping advertisements, streaming services, and recipes based on browsing activity who signed into Chrome with his Google Account? The NTP Modules Chromium team working on says so.
To see Shopping ads in Chrome on New Tab Page
- Launch chrome Canary
- Visit chrome://flags page
- Use the following flags
- NTP Modules
- NTP Shopping Task Module
You should choose “Enabled-Fake Data” for NTP Shopping Task Module before restarting the browser.
Voila, you’ve now ads card on Chairs on NTP.
If you hover over the circled “i” icon on the card, it tells “you’re seeing this item based on your previous activity using Google Services” and it suggests, you can see, change and delete your data by visiting the myactiviity.google.com page.
You can click the ‘x’ icon to close the card.
Do note, the chairs ad only shows up when you select fake Data, but not when you choose other options such as “Enabled” and “Enable-Real Data”.
The card message “continue the search for office chairs”, encourages users to do related searches on Google, and when clicked on the module, it takes the user to Google populated with search results and ads.
Chrome is also working on Recipes and Kaleidoscope modules for NTP, you can use the following flags to enable them
- “Enforce Kaleidoscope NTP module”
- “NTP Recipe Tasks module”
As of now, there is already a setting available on NTP in Customize to disable these cards.
For that,
- Open New Tab Page
- Click on “Customize”
- Select Cards and Enable “Hide cards”
- Click Done.
Chrome already shows promo messages on NTP and offers a flag to disable them. The search giant may be extending them with NTP Modules, we never know.
But do remember, flags are experimental features intended for Chromium developers to test new features, there is no guarantee they’ll make into Chrome stable as features.
Mozilla already makes some money by showing sponsored stories on Firefox NTP, If Google does that, will it face backlash from users?
UPDATE October 24, 2020: Google spokesperson sent Techdows a statement over email to say those are free product listings, and not ads and told, they usually test features that will help users in shopping and more.
“we’d like to clarify that this experiment is displaying free product listing, not ads. We regularly test new features of this kind to help users with tasks like shopping and more”.
What’s your take on this? Do think Google will dare to show such ads on Chrome New Tab Page? Let us know in the comments below?
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