A change to the omnibar has appeared in the latest DEV channel release of Google’s Chrome browser. Google have changed the star previously used for bookmarking pages and replaced it with a plus (+) sign.
This isn’t just an icon change though, Google have incorporated a new menu into that button. Now when you click it you see Bookmark this page and Share this page. If you are signed into Chrome (and if not why not??) then you will also see Send this page to your mobile device as well. As this is a site about smartphones, I will ignore the other options and focus on this one.
This feature has been available for a while for Android users, via Google’s Chrome to Phone extension/Android app but is now an integral part of Chrome with improvements. When you click this option it firstly shows you a list of your devices, allowing you to select which device you want to send it to. It also offers you the option of sending an offline copy of the page to the device, along with the size of the offline copy.
Unfortunately, this last feature has stopped working since I started writing this post. Previously it worked and when I unlocked my phone, it opened Chrome to the page I sent. Because it has stopped working I was unable to test sending an offline copy. I don’t know if this is my end or something in Chrome, but I will endeavour to find out and update this post.
Expect to see this coming to the Beta and Stable releases soon. If you can’t trust your everyday browsing to a Beta or Dev build then you can install Google Chrome Canary alongside the stable release (or, in fact, the dev/beta releases).
Give it a try!