Are too many tabs cluttering up your Chrome browser? Google Chrome’s new update, Chrome 81, introduces the Tab Group feature, allowing users to finally be able to organize tabs! The Tab Groups feature provides neat, color-coded labeling for all your tabs.
Here is how you can set up Tab Groups on your Google Chrome and maximize its features:
1. Enabling the feature
Make sure you have the latest version of Google Chrome installed on your machine (should be 81+). To check this go to Settings/Chrome and then select About Chrome. Otherwise:
- If you can update, do it.
- If can't, you can turn on this feature by navigating to
chrome://flagsand looking fortab groups. Make sure it isEnabled.
2. How to create a new tab group:
Just right-click a tab and then select
Add to New Groupoption.
Tabs will change colours depending on their group while a dot will also appear as a group header.
If you want to change a Tab group name then simply click on the group.
You can also change the colour of the group using this method.
3. If you want to add (remove) a tab to (from) a group:
- Simply right-click each tab and then select
Add to an existing group.
- You can also drag and drop the tabs into groups, and drag and drop to remove a tab out of a group.
- To create a new tab in a group, just right click the group label and select
New Tab in Group
Some credits goes to howtogeek
Enjoy and stay organized :)
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Top comments (16)
This is a little too late for me as I've already uninstalled Chrome and switched to Brave (for development) and Safari for general purpose stuff.
@crock out of curiosity, were you able to find in Brave/Safari a similar feature?
@tomer Short answer: yes. Long answer: Brave is based on the same engine as Chrome (an open source project called Chromium). As a result, the latest update of Brave (1.7.x) updated the Chromium engine underneath, which includes this new tab grouping functionality.
Safari negative 😞
Brave as Kieran mentioned uses Chromium under the hood and all Chrome extensions are more or less compatible with it. Heck, you install Brave extensions from the Chrome Web Store.
Didn't realize that the tab grouping was a feature of Chromium though as @k776 pointed out, so I guess the answer is yes!
Not sure about Brave and Safari, but Vivaldi has some pretty decent tab management features.
I'm also curious
I think this is neat, but don't see the benefit to my workflow. It's true, I usually end up with 149 tabs or so but I full screen my browser, and use vimium's vomnibar for tab switching.
Edit: base on comments above, yeah this seems to be in Brave's experimental features, for those who want to try just
brave://flagsand look for tab groupsStill need Firefox-esque tab strip scrolling before this is feasible imo. If you have that many tabs that you need grouping, Chrome just shrinks the tabs down where you can't read them.
Opera really nailed tab grouping back in the early 10s. Easy to use, drag the tabs over each other and bam, grouped. Expand or collapse the groups with one click to clean up space. Tab strip scrolling too.
Haven't seen anything as nice since and modern Opera lost their way. I still open up Opera 12 from time to time just to see what we lost :(
Firefox, imo, had the best tab management of all, but they moved it to a plugin when only a tiny percentage of people used it. I don't remember if that plugin is still supported anymore, but the groups were completely hidden away in a different pane and you could use that pane to move tabs between groups. The pinned tabs were shared between all groups, which I loved. And none of the tabs in inactive groups were loaded when the browser started, so that freed up resources. I think you could also hibernate groups later too.
Panorama was cool! It did have some issues and it was slow, but the concept was great. I think there's similar "session managers" but I don't think they're as good since they're not built-in.
I think this is a great step, but I feel like it's not really very useful yet. If I could close and repoen groups that would be awesome. Or only have one group showing at a time. Session buddy extension does all this pretty well too.
It also makes me feel like it would make it even easier to have more tabs open :-)
I am looking forward to see how this develops.
Great perspective @autoferrit , I totally agree about this!
This is nice
I noticed the feature a couple of days ago - a bit disappointed because it does not allow to collapse a group, or at least this is the case on my Ubuntu box. Does that work for you?
As of now, it's a bit useless. If he groups collapsed and expanded, that would help a lot, but just to add colors...
I agree. I think Vivaldi has the best options around tab-grouping, especially when combined with tiling.