How to enable tab grouping in Chrome
Tab management has always been something of a challenge in browsers. Tabbed browsing itself is great and shortly after the feature appeared in popular browsers, it was clear that it wasn’t going anywhere. It is far too convenient a way to browse the internet even if managing a lot of tabs can get tedious. For the most part, users make do by grouping tabs into windows; each window contains tabs for a different project or task. If you’d like to group tabs within a window, you can enable a flag in Chrome that adds color-based tab grouping to the browser.
Note: This feature may also be available in Chromium-based browsers.
Tab grouping in Chrome
Open Chrome and in the URL bar, enter the following. Tap Enter.
chrome://flags
This will take you to the Flags page. Use the search bar on this page to look for a flag called ‘Tab groups’. When you find it, open the dropdown next to it and select the ‘Enabled’ option. Click the Relaunch button to relaunch Chrome and apply the new state of the flag.
Now that tab grouping has been enabled, you can start using it. To group tabs, select one tab, hold down the Ctrl key, and then click other tabs that you want to select and add to the same group. Once you’ve selected the tabs, right-click any one of them and select the Add to new group option from the context menu. Repeat this process to create additional tab groups. A single tab can only be part of one group.
Tabs, once grouped, will be moved together and two different tab groups will be differentiated by a colored dot.
You can move tabs from one group to another and remove a tab from a group without adding it to one. To move a tab from one group to another, right-click it and select the ‘Add to existing group’ option. Select the group you want to move the tab to. To remove a tab from a group, right-click it and select the ‘Remove from group’ option.
Tab group colors are assigned by Chrome but if you click the dot that’s added after a group has been created, you can select the color of the tab group. These groups can also be named from the color customization pop-up. You will see a text box that looks as though it’s for searching for a color but the text that you enter in it becomes the ‘name’ of the group. You can change the group name any time you like but the longer the name, the more space it will take up on the tab bar.
Tab groups exist within a window. If you drag a group out of its window into a different window, or a new window, the groups will disappear. When you close and reopen a window, the tab groups are retained.
