It would be prudent here to explain what the pull-to-refresh feature is all about. When a webpage has to be refreshed, it is the common practice to click on the refresh button on the browser that is located at the top of the browser. In the pull-to-refresh facility, the user has to just pull down the page to have the browser refreshed.
This particular feature came into prominence when apps were introduced in smartphones. The small screen sizes did not make for a convenient location of the refresh icon and at times when people were on the move, the icon became hard to hit without a miss happening. Thus it could be said that the pull-to-refresh feature is in keeping with the changing needs of the user more than anything else.
Pull to Refresh Flag Working in Chrome OS Dev Channel from r/chromeos
Historically, the first attempts at incorporating the feature came about in 2008 when an app that preceded Twitter was first to try it out. But the market was not too kind to the product at the time and rarely do people give credit to this little know application back then.
Google with its future-ready outlook has managed to incorporate the pull-to-refresh facility in the Google Chrome OS and this has been well accepted in the market too. Probably it is a need of the times when more people would use the small screens of the smartphones more often than in the past. It is a common factor with most working folks to travel considerably for work or otherwise and in such a scenario, the convenience of pull-to-research simply cannot be downplayed at any time. But, the pull-to-refresh feature isn’t turned on by default, you have to enable it going into (or copy and paste the chrome://flags/#pull-to-refresh in the URL bar) in Chrome settings menu to activate the feature.
The leaders in any field would tend to dominate the offerings being introduced and it is but natural that the Chrome OS incorporates the pull-to-refresh feature in the coming releases. The comfort levels and user experience would be something quite unlike what has been on offer to help navigate the web page in the past.
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