These 3 features made me drop Chrome for Samsung’s new PC browser

When I installed Samsung Internet Beta for desktop earlier this week, I wasn’t expecting much. The Korean company is an established browser builder on Android, but that doesn’t mean its first desktop browser would be an immediate success. If anything, I was expecting a complete mess of AI fluff, unfocused design, and terrible performance. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Based on Google Chrome’s underpinnings, Samsung Internet Beta is a breath of fresh air. It’s 2025, and the odd mandatory mention of AI features is present, but Samsung Internet isn’t an “AI browser” in the same vein as OpenAI’s Atlas or Perplexity’s Comet. It is far more traditional in its philosophy and offers excellent design decisions that improve upon Chrome’s usability, privacy, and multitasking capabilities.

After using the browser for about a week, I’ve identified three Samsung Internet Beta features that stand out to me and that I hope Google considers incorporating into Chrome.

Forget AI tinsel and trinkets; multitasking is still the primary element of web browser design that actually matters. In this regard, Samsung Internet Beta for desktop includes two features that I’ve grown to love immensely. Called Sidebar and side panel, these two features provide an additional split-screen window that can be used side by side.

Like Windows’s Taskbar, the sidebar has several default website options that you can pin for quick access. For instance, if you want to open YouTube in this sliver of your screen, you can add it to the sidebar. Clicking on it will then launch it in the side panel. Best of all, if I want to view a creator’s website or perhaps a product suggestion mentioned in the video description, middle-clicking that link will open it in the larger, main browser window. It’s a wonderfully functional yet elegant design.

Some interesting use cases I’ve discovered include:

• My Android Authority dashboard opened in the main window, with reference materials or article previews in the side panel.
• Hacker News in the side panel and the articles I’m reading in the tab bar.
• NotebookLM in the side panel, with research in the main window.
• Google Keep in the side panel with whatever else you want to pair it with.
• Samsung Food in the side panel, and a bunch of recipe tabs available in the main window.

You get the gist.

Notably, the sidebar also includes shortcuts to more practical items, like a calendar (you can log in to your Samsung account to access your events and tasks), and any items open or bookmarked on Samsung Internet on your phone, provided you’re logged into both platforms.

Such a feature could work really well in Google Chrome, especially considering the number of Google apps I use in a browser app pinned to my taskbar.

One of my biggest Chrome gripes is its treatment of extensions that block unwanted content. With Samsung Internet Beta, I can block ads right from the outset. The browser packs built-in Smart anti-tracking and Ad blocker features, but what really sells me is the Privacy Dashboard itself.

As a Blokada user on Android and a former Pi-Hole runner, I quite like seeing which sites are being blocked behind the scenes. Samsung Internet does just that with the Privacy dashboard. Available in the settings menu, it allows you to view the total number of trackers and ads blocked, as well as the frequency of these encounters.

It’s a minor feature overall. If anything, built-in adblocking is the fundamental feature that Chrome should adopt from Samsung Internet. However, I do enjoy seeing how the ad-blocking system is working as I travel across the internet.

I recently upgraded to a faster laptop and plan to add even more RAM to it in due course, but I still use my older machine occasionally. It has just 4GB of RAM — barely enough to run a single web page, let alone allow for multitasking. While Google Chrome will actively consume all of this memory and offer no forgiveness, Samsung Internet Beta on PC gives me more control over which sites I want to remain active in the background, freeing up memory from those I don’t care about.

This is done through its Optimize memory use feature. When active, it frees up memory from tabs that aren’t in the foreground, allowing more memory for other tasks. Significantly, you can also add sites you want to keep in memory indefinitely. This could be tabs that are playing content, downloading items, an article or recipe you’re reading, or a banking app.

I’ve only used Samsung Internet Beta on PC for a few days now, but it has already left a big impression on me. Remember, it’s still in beta, but it’s swift, intelligently designed, doesn’t force Samsung features on me but includes them if I want, and offers more control over how my desktop’s hardware is used. It’s an impressive debut, especially when compared to Google Chrome.