Google has announced some improvements for its Chrome browser on iOS and iPadOS, including enhanced visual search with text modifiers, quickly looking up maps, finding better prices on shopping sites, and saving PDFs and images directly to Drive and Photos.

Chrome for iPhone and iPad previously supported Google Lens, but you had to upload an image, and you couldn’t tweak the results with text modifiers. Now, your visual search can also include text for the most relevant information. Hit the camera icon in the URL bar to search for an image, then refine your results with relevant keywords if you’d like to zero in on something specific, like a visual attribute.

“Depending on your search, you might also get an AI Overview that brings together the most relevant information from across the web,” Google notes.

Next, if you tap an underlined address for a specific location on a website, like the company’s official address in the About Us section or similar, Chrome will show you a handy mini-map without yanking you out of the app and into the Maps app, like before. “We’re currently experimenting with this feature and will continue to roll it out globally over the coming months, so keep an eye out for it on your device,” the company wrote.

Chrome is also more flexible with PDF downloads than before by letting you save PDF files directly to Google Drive and Photos. This was possible before by selecting the Google Drive option from the Share menu when viewing a PDF provided you had the Drive app installed. But now, you can save directly to Drive without the app Drive client installed provided. You must be signed into at least one Google account in Chrome for this to work.

After tapping a PDF download link on a page or an image file, Chrome displays the file name above the URL bar at the bottom, along with a Save command. Choosing it brings up the Google Drive or Google Photos options. Chrome saves PDF files in a new Drive folder titled “Saved from Chrome.” If you’re low on local device storage, saving PDFs to your Drive storage in the cloud will free up space and help avoid the annoying “Storage Almost Full” notification.

The Shopping Insights feature informs you about great prices with a “Good Deal Now” notification in the address bar. This will reveal useful information, including price history and price tracking, that can help you make informed purchasing decisions and save money.

You’ll see this info only when browsing products on shopping sites for which Google has a shopping insight. For Shopping Insights to work, you must be signed into Chrome and have the “Make Searches and Browsing Better” setting turned on. This feature is restricted to the United States but will expand to more regions “in the coming months.”

Google promises even more Chrome iOS features “in the coming months.” The new features require the latest version of Chrome. To update your copy of Chrome manually (automatic updates take time), open the Chrome page on the App Store and click the Update button.

Following Apple’s changes that enable custom browser engines on the iOS and iPadOS platforms in the European Union (EU), Google has been working on a new version of Chrome for iOS with its proprietary Blink rendering engine instead of WebKit. So far, however, there have been no iPhone browsers featuring custom engines in the EU countries.

Source: Google