Great Experience on Big Screen Devices: Chrome Multitasking Improves User Productivity

Author / Android Team

Google Chrome is the most widely used browser around the world, and the Chrome team wants to ensure that users have a great experience on all devices. Many users have been asking for more productivity-enhancing features from Chrome on mobile, tablet and foldable devices to better match the functionality of the desktop version. To meet these needs, the team decided to dedicate resources to creating features that facilitate multitasking capabilities. While the team built this feature for mobile as well, they wanted to focus specifically on enabling support where people use it most, namely large-screen devices like tablets and foldables.

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The Chrome team initially decided to focus on building a way for users to open multiple Chrome windows (instances) side by side. They make good use of Android 12L's features (eg taskbar) and Samsung Edge Panel.

The Chrome team leveraged the singleInstancePerTask launch mode to build a side-by-side feature and wanted to strike a balance between allowing users to use multiple windows at the same time and ensuring the feature was still available. The Chrome team researched usability best practices, looked at other multi-window experiences on larger-screen devices, and considered various constraints to ensure optimal device memory usage. In the end, they concluded that users could use up to five windows side by side smoothly on large-screen devices, and the app was updated to support this feature.

The Chrome team wants users to take advantage of this feature more easily, so a "New Window" shortcut has been added to the menu. They created this shortcut using the intent flag combination LAUNCH_ADJACENT|NEW_TASK 's new feature. Making this feature more prominent in the product has greatly increased usage. Multi-window feature usage is thus increased by 18 times.

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This is a brand new feature, and the Chrome team has verified that the Chrome app's multi-instance feature is used 42% more on tablets and foldable devices than on phones that support it. This also proves that this feature is very popular with Chrome users on large-screen devices, and it is worth the team to invest resources to build these features to improve the experience of Chrome users on large-screen devices.

They also got very positive feedback from users on large screen devices in the app reviews:

This app is awesome! You can split screens, change tabs, and more. There are also many games to play in it. I would like to give this app a five star rating.

The Chrome team plans to continue improving the Chrome experience on large-screen devices in the future to further help users be more productive.

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You can visit the official documentation to learn more about how to get started to optimize the application for large screen devices. You are also welcome to continue to pay attention to the "Android Developer" WeChat public account for more latest content.

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