Rumor: Chrome To Get "Morning Reads" Feature

A large number of Android device owners probably use the Chrome app for Android. If you’re one of those users of the Beta or Dev version, you likely keep a fairly close eye on new commits, features and bug reports coming down the pipeline in the open source Chromium project that Chrome is built from. New features and bug fixes normally appear in the Beta and Dev versions of Chrome, on both desktop and mobile, fairly soon after they show up in the Chromium tracker. One of the newest features to show up, in the bug tracker for whatever reason, is being called “morning reads”.

Morning reads, according to details gleaned from the code base, the feature aims to give users a leg up on updates to their favorite sites and other news they may have missed overnight. This is accomplished by figuring out when a user tends to first start up their device in the morning and, around that time, plastering a scrollable news feed to their new tab page. Articles on the list can be swiped away, much like Gmail messages or Google+ notifications. Some of the bits and pieces on the tracker refer to “morning reads”, “zine”, “fetching of snippets” and various personalized issues. Given how vague this content is at this point, it’s hard to say what type of interface the feature may have or what content will be there, beyond the speculation provided.

Part of the tracker goes on to describe how the system will determine how much content to fetch and when. Options such as power level, network availability and how likely the user is to view the new tab page are mentioned, but no specific details or algorithms are revealed. It can be assumed that this will mean that some sort of smart fetching feature will be on board to keep the feature from fetching content around the clock, causing CPU load and battery drain when the user may be out and about, using their device. No release timeline was stated for the feature. Hit up the source link to view the tracker and, if this feature interests you, keep an eye on it to watch for a possible release.