Chrome for Android will soon help you multitask with PiP web links within apps

Chromium Custom tabs were added to Android in 2020 in order to provide app developers and users a way to have a personalized browser experience within a specified app. The feature allows users to open web pages within the app without having to switch to a separate browser or use the old WebView method. However, even with the added convenience of having all the features of a full browser available in apps like X or Slack, for example, there were still some caveats when you still wanted to have access to the original message. Once you opened a web link in an app, you were stuck in that view and the only way to see the original post again was to leave the web page. This will change soon. A new experimental flag has appeared in Chrome for Android, which Michael Rahman And Artem Russakovsky REMARK. The flag named “Allow custom tabs to be minimized” allows you to minimize the web page that loads in an application after clicking a link, displaying it as a small overlay at the bottom of the screen, in picture-in-picture style. This view allows you to access web content without completely leaving the original post.

This feature can currently be enabled in the stable version of Chrome for Android by going to chrome://flags and looking for the #cct-minimized flag. However, we do not recommend doing this if you are not a power user (or a daredevil) simply because enabling experimental flags can sometimes break features, lead to crashes, or cause other issues with the Navigator.

That said, this feature is already enabled by default in Chrome for Android Beta. It became available with version 122 and is currently at version 123. The stable version of Chrome for Android is at version 122, so we shouldn't have to wait much longer for this to become a standard feature for all users.