ChatGPT’s Chrome extension can now read and act on your tabs

OpenAI has given its ChatGPT extension for Chrome a significant upgrade: the assistant can now use the tabs you already have open, both to answer questions and to carry out tasks. The update was announced by the official ChatGPT account on 15 October and reported by Engadget and The Verge.

What the extension can do now

The new abilities depend on which ChatGPT mode you are in:

• Chat can look across your open tabs and gather information. OpenAI’s demo shows someone asking ChatGPT to compare three sofas open in separate tabs by size, price, delivery time and return policy.
• Work, OpenAI’s agent for multi-step tasks, can control Chrome tabs: send messages, fill out forms, download files, and organise or group a messy tab bar.

OpenAI’s own example prompts include filling in a registration form from an event brief “and stop before submitting”, moving vendor details from several tabs into a comparison sheet, and filling in a new-patient form at a dentist and then adding the appointment to a calendar.

A bigger sidebar

The ChatGPT side panel in Chrome has also been rebuilt. It now has access to your entire ChatGPT conversation history, and you can switch between Chat and Work without leaving the page you are reading. According to Engadget, the extension is available on every ChatGPT plan.

Not just Chrome

OpenAI says the extension also runs in other Chromium-based browsers. Its help documentation lists Edge, Brave, Opera and Vivaldi alongside Chrome, noting that Opera does not support the side chat, so tasks there start from the ChatGPT desktop app.

Why it matters

OpenAI shut down its own ChatGPT Atlas browser on 9 August, so the extension is now its main way into the browser. The new tab control puts it in direct competition with Google’s Gemini “auto browse” features in Chrome.

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