Check the below picture.
Confused?
Well, that’s my mountain of chrome tabs. My past highest personal record is 53 tabs, although I have friends who keep like several hundreds of tabs open on their Macbooks.
I think this might happen with you also when you’re up to finding something and doing multitasking; eventually, you end up opening lots of tabs in chrome.
What is more painful is when you want to open a particular web page tab of your work from piles of tabs, again, you end up scratching your head and start finding tabs, and eventually, you navigate all tabs to get on to your desired web page tab. That’s a hell lot of pain and time-waste.
What if there was a way to combine some of the tabs to reduce the clutter a bit, and make it more organized?
Well, guess what, developers of chrome felt this pain too, and they have cooked something called “Tab Groups”.
In today’s post, I will be discussing tab groups, and tell you the step by step guide on how to enable it on your browser. Here’s an overview.
What is the Tab Groups feature?
According to chrome developers, tab groups “Allows users to organize tabs into visually distinct groups, e.g., to separate tabs associated with different tasks.”
So basically, when you enable this feature, it will add a big dot ⚫ on the left side of the tab, and you also get color-coding options to highlight tabs, which help you to distinguish tabs based on your tasks.
This is very handy as this allows you to organize your tabs in a better way so that you can find any tab you need quickly, rather than swiping over tabs every time.
How to group tabs in Google chrome?
Step-1: Tab groups feature live in chrome version 73 and above. You can check the text of your chrome browser by doing this: Open chrome > click on the three-dot menu on top right corner navigate to Help > click About Google Chrome. Check the version now, and if not the latest, then let it update.
Step-2: As of now, this feature seems to be still in development and testing, and that’s why it’s not enabled for all regular users. We need to access and activate this feature using “Chrome Experimental Features”. To access it type chrome://flags in the address bar and press Enter. It will open an experiment page.
Step-3: Now type tab group in the search flags box of the experiments page.
Step-4: To use this feature, click on Enabled on the drop-down list.
Step-5: As you enable it, chrome will ask you to restart the browser. Click on the Relaunch button and let it restart.
Step-6: Now, to use this feature right-click on the active tab, and you will see Add to New Group option, click on it.
Step-7: As you click, a big dot ⚫ on the left side of the tab with highlighted color on the active tab will appear.
Voila!! That’s how you can use this feature, easy, right? It helps me to keep my tabs organized and a big-time savior for me.
Well, that’s not it, you got a host of customization features as per your liking. You can change the color of the dot; also, you can Name this group and do a lot more.
You can create as many groups as you want and add tabs in this group using Add to Existing Group. You can also select the tab, move it, and drop it on the existing tab group to add it to that particular tab group.
Well, that’s all. You have enabled tab-grouping successfully.
Group Tabs in Google Chrome Mobile Browser:
Well its not just the desktop version of Google Chrome, you can also enable Tab Groups on the Google Chrome Mobile. Note that this won’t work with all versions of the Chrome Browser.
Type chrome://flags and search for ‘Tab Grid Layout.’ If you find it, choose ‘Enable.’ Now force-close the browser and restart it. You should be able to use the Tab Groups feature.
You simply need to long-press on a tab and hover it on another tab. This should do the trick.
Enable Tab Groups in Microsoft Edge Browser:
If you are using the new Microsoft Edge Browser based on Chromium, you can also activate the tab groups feature. This is just one of the several new Microsoft Edge (Chromium) Tricks I have discussed recently.
It is similar to the process described above for the chrome browser. The only difference is instead of chrome://flags, you need to type edge://flags in the search bar. This should pull up the experimental features. Search for ‘Tab Groups’ and enable it.
Restart Edge Browser, and voila. You have successfully activated grouping tabs on Edge Browser.
Last Words:
Remember, as of now, once you grouped tabs it will stay only till the browser is running, as you close and start the browser the tab groups will be dispersed like all active tabs. If Google adds the option of saving/pinning tab groups, it will be a lot helpful for everyone who frequently opens particular sites.
Here’s another quick tip: If you don’t like this feature or don’t want to use it, you can disable it again via going to the chrome/edge experimental features page. Just disable it and restart once. Your browser will come back to the regular version yet.
That’s all about grouping tabs on Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browsers. If you have further queries, just drop me a comment below. I will be happy to help.
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Abhijit Parmar is a post graduate in Computer Engineering and Tech Geek at heart. When he is not writing for you, probably found exploring Tech on the Internet. Buddies call him Tech Troubleshooter & buy gadgets only after taking a piece of advice from him.
