If you’re using Chrome as the default browser on your Android and iOS devices, then you definitely aware of the ‘Tab Groups’ feature. In this post, you will learn how to enable it in Chrome for desktop.
Google recently rolled out the latest version of the Chrome browser, and now its Chrome 80. Start with it, the company introduced lots of handy features and one out of them is a new GUI feature called Tab Grouping.
Tab Groups in Chrome
Tab Grouping is already available on the Chrome app for mobile devices and now the company has rolled out the same feature for desktop too.
Using Tab Grouping feature users can combine individual tabs into organized groups. Right now, the feature is enabled out of the box for limited users. In case, you’re interested in using the feature, then it is possible to enable it.
Enable Tab Groups in Chrome
Update Chrome to the latest version i.e. Chrome v80.
After that, launch it and visit the following flag address: chrome://flags/#tab-groups
Using the Tab Groups drop-down, you need to change the settings from Default to Enabled.
Click on the Relaunch button to apply the changes. By doing this, you have successfully enabled the Tab Group feature in the Chrome browser. Let’s learn how to use it.
Use Tab Group in Chrome
Launch the New tab on the Chrome browser and then right-click on the tab, select ‘Add to new group‘
After that, right-click on another tab that you want to include in the same group. From the context menu select ‘Add to existing group‘ and then select the group. This is how the group will look like:
Following the same procedure, you can add as many tabs in the same group.
You can also customize the group. For that, click on the Tab indicator (it’s orange in my case) on the tab bar, a dialog box will open.
Here, you can set the name and color of your choice for that group.
Using the same dialog box, you can also create ‘New tab in group’, Ungroup, and Close group. If interested, you can also send feedback about the same feature to the company.
For example, if you have created two groups this is how Tab groups will look like:
The purpose of adding this feature to the Chrome browser is to make it easier for the users to gather all the tab related to your task under a group with the help of a unique name and color.
You can also check out following YouTube video to know more about how to use the feature:
Apart from this feature, Chrome also introduced Quieter Notification Permission Prompts and Heavy Ad Intervention feature. You can use the following links to know more about them:
- How to Enable Heavy Ad Intervention in Google Chrome v80
- How to Enable Quieter Notification Permission Prompts in Google Chrome
What are your thoughts about Chrome Tab Groups feature? Find it useful? We would like to hear your opinion in the comments.
Thanks, Winaero for the tip.
Groups won’t pin (to save space) so it’s useless. Takes up more space with them as you now have an additional “tab” which is the group name. Also, when you add pined tabs into groups they become unpinned. When you try to pin them again, they jump out of the group. The only way to keep a pinned tab in a group is to drag the pinned tab to the group.
Thanks for sharing your opinion 🙂
I agree with Zvi. I was playing with Tab Groups myself and it’s ALMOST very useful to me. If I could simply left-click on the group tab and have the entire group immediately shrink down to the single tab (or grow back into all of the tabs in the group), then this would be a perfect feature (in my own personal use case, anyway). As it sits now, Tab Groups simply adds yet another tab to the 10-25 tabs I routinely bounce around between on a daily basis and the only somewhat useful benefit to me is the ability to assign a unique color to all the tabs in the group. Overall, it’s rather a net negative. I’m not sure color is enough to make me sacrifice the space each extra group tab takes up.
Regardless of whether or not I end up actually using it, I’ll probably at least leave the feature enabled to show my support for it in any metrics that are gathered in the background. Maybe it’ll get improved in the future.