Google just made every AI prompt you've perfected into a one-click tool. "Skills in Chrome" saves prompts as reusable shortcuts in the browser's Gemini sidebar. Find something that works for comparing products or scanning documents? Save it from your chat history. Next time, type a forward slash to run it on any page, or across multiple tabs at once. The feature is rolling out now to Mac, Windows, and ChromeOS for English-US users.
Classic platform behavior. A healthy ecosystem of third-party AI extensions already exists for Chrome. Developers figured out DOM manipulation and natural language to automate web tasks. Zapier curates lists of these tools. InfoWorld and ScrapeHero have documented how LLMs changed browser automation. Now Google is absorbing that functionality natively, with a library of pre-built Skills for common tasks like recipe analysis and shopping comparisons.
Security is the interesting tension. Chrome extensions have a well-earned reputation for security risks. Google says Skills are built on Chrome's existing security foundation, with automated red-teaming and confirmation prompts before actions like sending emails or adding calendar events. But some users are skeptical, wondering whether the real motivation is making it easier to feed data to Google. That cynicism isn't unreasonable.
If you repeat the same AI tasks across websites, this saves genuine time. Product Manager Hafsah Ismail says early testers built Skills for everything from calculating protein macros to comparing specs across tabs.
And the developers who built businesses on AI-powered Chrome extensions? They're about to find out what happens when Google decides your product should be a browser feature.