Chrome has made it easier to understand your browsing history

It’s easy to check your Google Chrome history and scratch your head trying to remember why certain sites are there. This could be because you were redirected to the site through an app rather than while browsing within Chrome. To fix this, Google simply modified Chrome history to add an indication of whether a site was visited via a third-party app.

Artem Russakovskii pointed out the subtle update in a post on X. The post said, “Google Chrome history now tells you if a site was visited via a third-party app, like the Google App or Google News. Cool.” It goes on to credit Hamzah Malik with noticing the change.

The post includes a screenshot of Google Chrome history on a mobile device to back up this claim. Three of the posts show one of the apps the author mentioned, alongside the URL of a site visited through those apps.

It’s such a small update that many people won’t notice it for a while, or at all, but it’s the kind of common sense addition we like to see. More and more apps prefer that users stay in them even when using external experiences, like a news article, while the page history is logged in Chrome. If you then open Chrome, you’ll be scratching your head (especially on shared devices), and this change helps to demystify the situation a bit.