Google shipped Skills in Chrome on April 14, and it answers a question most Gemini users were quietly asking: why am I retyping the same 200-word prompt every morning?
The idea is simple. Save a prompt from your Gemini chat history as a Skill, then trigger it later with a “/” or “+” in the side panel. The Skill runs against whatever page you’re on, plus any other tabs you pick. Google is also seeding a public library of remixable recipes — things like calculating protein macros from an online recipe, pulling the important points out of long PDFs, comparing product specs across shopping tabs, or breaking down ingredient lists on the fly.
The rollout is narrow. Desktop only — Mac, Windows and ChromeOS — and only for users whose Chrome language is set to English-US. Google says Skills sit on top of Chrome’s existing safeguards, and that sensitive actions like adding a calendar event or sending an email on your behalf ask for manual confirmation before they run.
This is not a first. Anthropic’s Claude in Chrome already does “shortcuts” — same “/” trigger, same premise of saving a working prompt and calling it again later. Claude goes further than Skills in one dimension: you can record a workflow by clicking the cursor icon, and then schedule the recorded task to repeat daily or weekly. The catch is cost. Claude in Chrome sits behind paid plans, starting at Pro. Skills ships free with Gemini in Chrome.
Third-party extensions filled this gap for years. OneClickPrompts drops a button menu of saved prompts inside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and other chat windows. Prompt Sloth gives you “//” shortcuts that expand into full instructions. These will still matter if you bounce between models often, because Skills only works with Gemini, and Claude’s shortcuts only work with Claude. The browser vendors absorbing this feature is probably the end of the road for smaller prompt-library extensions, though.
The concrete win is smaller than Google’s framing suggests. Skills is a saved-search shortcut for prompts. Not a new model, not an agent. It matters because most useful AI workflows are just good prompts that someone wrote once and never wrote down. Chrome noticing that pattern and adding a button is overdue, not breakthrough. Expect Edge and Safari to copy the feature inside the quarter.
Sources
blog.google Anthropic Support Chrome Unboxed iTWire
This article is AI-generated.
