[Update: Screenshots] Chromebooks to support continued reading from Chrome tabs opened on Android

Update 7/23: The Continue Reading feature for Chromebooks is now available as a flag in the Chrome OS Canary channel. Screenshots below.

Back in the early days of Google Chrome for Android, you used to need the Chrome to Mobile extension and the Chrome to Phone app to sync your PC and your Android device. The extension and app let you beam web pages, notes, and directions from your PC to your phone or tablet. Both of these tools have since been deprecated in favor of Chrome's native sync functionality, but there's one minor annoyance with using this feature to share links from your Android device to your PC: you'll lose your place on the page by opening it from the "History" drop-down. Now, it seems that Google is adding a new feature on Chrome OS to let users pick up reading where they left off when moving from their Android phone or tablet to Chromebooks.

The feature, called "Continue reading in Chrome," is said to "allow users to seamlessly continue reading a web page when they switch from phones or tablets to Chromebook." According to the code, the feature will recommend the latest opened tab on your Android phone or tablet. If the last tab opened on a device was opened more than 2 hours ago, it won't be recommended to you. There are also options for the latest opened tab to be searchable and shown in the launcher.

The commit implementing this feature has just been merged and should start appearing in tomorrow's Chrome OS Canary builds. My HP Chromebook X2 is on the Canary build so once I updated to the latest release I'll keep an eye out for the feature and let you all know once it goes live. I open a lot of long articles on my phone and would love to not have to manually scroll to where I stopped reading when I switch over to my Chromebook.

Update: Live in Canary

The Continue Reading feature just popped up in the Canary channel of Chrome OS. The flag is called "Enable continue reading" and it can be found at chrome://flags/#enable-continue-reading. The most recent tab from your phone is shown underneath the launcher search bar. Here's what it looks like when enabled (via Chrome Story):

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