Chrome for Android may soon let you open web pages directly in Chrome instead of Custom Tabs

Chrome for Android is testing a new setting that could open web pages in the full Chrome browser instead of Custom Tabs.

Custom Tabs are designed to let Android apps open web pages without taking users completely out of the app. This can be useful for quickly viewing a link, but users who prefer to keep their web browsing in Chrome may want links from different apps to appear as regular Chrome tabs instead.

Google could make this happen automatically, without requiring users to move each page to Chrome manually.

Spotted in the latest Chrome Canary, “Always open custom tabs in Chrome” appears under Settings > Tabs and tab groups. Its description says, “Open web pages in Chrome browser instead of custom tabs.”

For example, when you open a story from the Google app, the page can appear in a Custom Tab that runs within Chrome. You can then use the “Open in Chrome browser” option from the menu to send the page to a regular Chrome tab. Once this feature starts working, that extra step could disappear, with the page opening directly in Chrome instead.

At the moment, the option does not appear to work as expected. After enabling it, web pages can still open in a Custom Tab. This suggests Google is still working on the feature.

For now, it is available in Chrome Canary, and Google has not said when it plans to bring it to the stable version of Chrome for Android.

The feature is tied to a flag called “Always Open Custom Tabs in Browser.” Its description reads: “Enable setting to always open Custom Tabs in the Chrome browser.”