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Earlier this week, Google quietly released an updated interface for Chrome on Android, showing open tabs in a grid instead of stacked cards. Beyond this aesthetic change, the update also includes Tab Groups, one of the most flexible and powerful features for desktop Chrome. Here’s what Tab Groups can do and how to turn this new feature on or off. First, the new layout has been enabled by default on many devices, especially pixels. If you’re using the latest version of Chrome but your tabs are still laid out as overlapping cards, you can go to chrome: // flags / # enable-tab-grid-layout and manually enable it. Then after restarting Chrome (twice) the change should stay. Conversely, if you really like the old layout, you can do the reverse and manually turn off the option.
Technically, the feature has been around since the middle of last year, but it’s only now that tab groups have escaped the realm of beta and officially joined the mainstream feature set.
Links open in the background are automatically grouped to keep your browser tidy
Once the tab groups are up and running, you can test it by dragging and dropping all the tabs together to group them. Each tab group will display the number of tabs affiliated with it, and tapping on it will expand the group to show its tabs, like app folders on the home screen.
Even without this manual drag-and-drop, Chrome will automatically group tabs when you long-press a link and open it in a new tab. That way, all the pages you open in the background will instantly be grouped with the tab you’re currently on. This is especially useful for things like comparing different products when shopping online.
When viewing a tab that belongs to a group, Chrome also displays a collapsible ribbon at the bottom with an icon for each page in that group, so that you can easily switch between different tabs in the same group. Again, great for comparing information from various tabs or multitasking.
How tab groups appear in the new Chrome layout for Android
Overall, this is a fairly faithful execution of the desktop function, but there are a number of significant differences. The desktop version allows you to rename your tab groups and assign one of eight colors to easily distinguish them. On the other hand, the mobile version doesn’t have it but instead lets you instantly see the number of tabs in a group, which the desktop browser doesn’t show you.
Are you excited to see this new feature land on Android? Or are you going to stick with the old layout?
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