C. Scott Brown / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google Chat is adding the ability to preview new messages by moving your pointer over the contact’s name.
- Messages won’t be marked as read until you actually click through, ensuring you don’t miss anything important.
- Previews are starting to arrive now, and should be available everywhere next month.
How much time have you spent scrolling around YouTube in your browser, looking for that next clip to watch, without actually clicking anything? Thanks to mouse-over previews, we can keep that up for quite a while, seamlessly jumping from thumbnail to thumbnail, getting a taste for what they offer. When you want a quick sense of what a whole lot of videos are about, there’s probably no better way to do it. And now a very similar tool is coming to… Google Chat?
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Well, not for videos, anyway, but today Google announces that Chat is getting mouse-over previews of its own.
Using it couldn’t be simpler: When you hover your pointer over a name in the list of conversations on the left, you’ll now start seeing the most recent message in that conversation.
This only works when there’s a currently unread message (indicated by Chat bolding that contact’s name), and previewing in this manner doesn’t mark the message as read — you’ll have to actually click through for Chat to register that.
And… that’s about it. There’s no setting to enable for this — it’s just going to start working, and should be working for everybody by the middle of December. It may not be the most impactful change to happen to Chat, but especially if you’re trying to keep on top of a whole lot of conversations at once, this legitimately looks like a useful way to preview them all and decide which ones you need to engage with first.
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