How to improve vertical tabs in Edge Chromium

Update your Edge Chromium browser today and you’ll get a funny little prompt asking if you want to enable the browser’s new Vertical Tabs feature. As someone who always likes to try new things, I decided to follow my browser’s suggestion.

This, of course, gave me a pretty monstrous list of tabs on the left side of my browser. (Yes I really need to declutter—It’s just a small crop of the list that fills the entire vertical space of my 1440p display.)

You will notice that all of my Reddit links got mixed up. This is intentional: I looked for ways to make the vertical tab bar a bit more manageable –because it now looks more like an outline than a desert of tabs that lives above my browser – and I came across a few tips to consider if you are doing a test drive the new interface.

Before you begin, know that the default look of your sidebar doesn’t have to be permanent. Click on the small “<" arrow in the upper right corner of your tab bar to reduce it all in a series of icons. Hover over it and your tabs will expand. I admit I don’t find this setup the most useful for productivity, but it at least gives my browser a super clean look.

When it comes to organizational hacks, I recommend entering edge: // flags in the address bar of your browser and by activating three different indicators:

• # edge-tab-groups: Allows users to organize tabs into visually distinct groups, for example to separate tabs associated with different tasks.
• # edge-tab-groups-auto-create: Automatically creates groups for users, if tab groups are enabled.
• # edge-tab-groups-collapse: Allows a tab group to be collapsible and expandable, if tab groups are enabled.

These won’t do anything for the tabs you’ve already opened, but will drop new tabs you create from the same domain into a convenient tab group that you can collapse and expand at will. While you can still clutter up your tab bar, at least grouping your tabs together will help you manage it a bit better.

Another approach you can take (replacing or in addition to the “groups” function) is to use an extension to organize your list of open tabs. I appreciate Tab organizer, which automatically sorts all your tabs by URL. The extension will automatically sort your tabs every time you press a keyboard shortcut key, but I find it more useful to set it to auto sort tabs by time intervals. Out of sight, out of mind.

Finally, there are two more browser flags that you can activate for fun, not because they’ll help keep your tabs organized. Ride up edge: // flags / again and turn on:

• # tab-hover-cards: Allows a pop-up window with tab information to be visible when hovering over a tab. This will replace the tooltips on the tabs.
• # tab-hover-card-images: Displays a preview image in tab rollover maps, if tab rollover maps are enabled.

Now when you fly over your mouse over one of your tabs in your vertical bar, you will get a nice pop-up window that gives you the full site title and image preview:

That said, I’m still waiting for the biggest tweak of all: a way to resize the vertical tab bar so I can see a site name a bit more. by default. This was possible when Microsoft was testing the feature in the beta versions of Edge Chromium, so hopefully it will come back at some point..