Here's the problem. You're using a mobile app, tapping your way around various menus and doing everything you'd normally do. You then tap on an icon—or maybe a simple link to the web—and one of two things happen: both of which can be a little annoying, and both of which Google thinks is a less than ideal treatment.
"Opening links in the browser is familiar for users and easy to implement, but results in a heavy-weight transition between the app and the web. You can get more granular control by building a custom browsing experience on top of Android's WebView, but at the cost of more technical complexity and an unfamiliar browsing experience for users," reads a blog post from Google "chief tab customizer" Yusuf Ozuysal.
The solution that Google has come up with, which you'll now see debuting in a handful of apps over the next few weeks, is called custom tabs. The feature arrived via the most recent release of Chrome for Android and, with it, developers will now be able to customize the look of the browser that renders webpages from in-app links. Custom tabs should also allow users to get to webpages even faster than if an app pulled up a separate Chrome instance or used WebViews.
"Custom tabs are optimized to load faster than WebViews and traditional methods of launching Chrome. Apps can pre-load pages in the background so they appear to load nearly instantly when the user navigates to them. Apps can also customize the look and feel of Chrome to match their app by changing the toolbar color, adjusting the transition animations, and even adding custom actions to the toolbar so users can perform app-specific actions directly from the custom tab," Ozuysal writes.
Not only do custom tabs support a number of features found in Chrome, including saved passwords, autofill, Tap to Search, and Sync, but they'll also work seamlessly with any cookies that might have been previously stored on a user's device as a result of his or her standard Chrome browsing. In other words, if you already logged into a website on a Chrome instance, then you'll remain logged in if you visit that same website via an app's custom tab.
The first apps that will start to support custom tabs over the next few weeks include Twitter, Tumblr, Medium, and Feedly (to name a few).
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