I have a minor annoyance that I thought would have an easy fix, but apparently doesn’t. Opening any link from within an app or from the discover feed on my mobile device doesn’t open the full browser, but only the (Chrome-based) WebView rendering tool. The thing is that while reading something, I’ll sometimes have to look something else up (or get distracted or remember something else etc.), so I’ll move to the home screen to access the search bar, then click on whatever link seems relevant, which will open a new WebView instance, losing what I had originally opened.
This essentially negates the benefit introduced by tabbed browsing: that you can manage multiple streams of content at once. I thought that there would be an easy way to remedy this, but hadn’t so far bothered to dig for one, but now, it seems as if this behavior can’t be circumvented—if I don’t want to loose my current page, I have to manually open it in the browser.
So, first of all, is this true, or is there a way to default to my standard browser instead? Failing that, is there a way to alter my behavior to run into the annoyance of having lost my last site less often? Is there a way to view a history of pages viewed in WebView, or even just restore the last one? Finally, for extra credit, what’s the purpose of this? I can’t imagine why anybody would want this to be the default behavior, at least from the user side. Is there something I’m missing?
(EDIT: OK, I just found that I could switch off this behavior in the Google app, which takes care of the problem with links from the Discover-feed or from Google searches, which will probably cut down on the annoyance a great deal; but still, any more global solution?)