Seeing a browser packed full of open tabs makes me feel anxious, which is unfortunate because I am a person who consistently has an excessive number of tabs open at once (19 right now — two of which I am actually using. Why can’t I close them?!).
While the ‘pin tab’ feature has been helpful to at least collapse their size and make my addiction to browser tabs look slightly more manageable and deliberate, it’s still a huge problem for my productivity. And I know I’m not alone.
Thankfully, Google has released an effective solution to browser tab addiction in its latest update that promises to make users feel way more organised. In amongst a bunch of new features, Google revealed a new Tab Groups feature, which helps you organise your open tabs into categories and hide the ones you don’t need access to.
“With a simple right click, you can group your tabs together and label them with a custom name and colour. Once the tabs are grouped together, you can move and reorder them on the tab strip,” Google says in an explainer.
How you group your tabs is up to you. You can sort them by priority (ASAP, urgent, EOD, etc), or via topic — like shopping, documents, work, or reading list.
You can expand the tabs you’re currently browsing, and collapse those you don’t need access to. Improved ‘tab previews’ allow you to hover over your tabs for a condensed look at the full page (no more clicking through all your tabs to find that spreadsheet), while “under the hood” improvements have even sped up the use of tabs by 10%.
How to enable Tab Groups
Tab Groups appears to be rolling out for users worldwide. To check if the feature is live for you, right-click an open browser tab and click ‘Add tab to group’ then ‘New Group’. From here, click the circle that appears to the left-hand side of the tab to customise the colour and name the group according to a category of your choice.