If you’re like me, you often end up with 20 tabs open in Chrome, and it takes you several minutes to figure out which tab you were working in whenever you move to a different one. That’s a life of chaos, but with Google’s underhyped Tab Groups feature, we can all leave that life behind.
Tab Groups make it easy to keep related tabs together and make quick work of keeping you on task, instead of clicking through your tabs multiple times a day trying to figure out where you were. Tab Groups were previously only available in Chrome Beta, but Google has slowly begun rolling out the feature to Chrome Stable users since May. An update on August 25 formally rolled out the option to Chrome users, rather than only being accessible from Chrome Experiments. You can check to see if it’s currently enabled for your browser by right-clicking and looking for the “Add Tab To Group” option; if not, you’ll need to follow a few quick steps to access and enable it.
It only takes two clicks to either add a tab to a new category or to an existing one. From there, you can add a short description for your tab group, like “Work” or “Friends” or “Kids,” and assign a group one of eight colors. You can also simply assigned a group a color without naming it. If you want to open a new tab under a particular, just right-click and select “New Tab To The Right.”
GoogleTab groups have a slim colorful line wrapped around either the top or the bottom of them (top if it’s the active color), so you can see at a glance which tabs are a part of a particular group. The feature is super handy for keeping your tabs for work, school, kids, and fun all separate from each other but still easy to access.
At any time, you can change a group’s name or color. You can also right-click and remove a tab from a group, or move it around your other tabs, and the group information will drop that way as well. This is a little annoying, however, if you’re just wanting to reorganize your tabs, but it doesn’t take much effort to set the info up again. This will hopefully patched by Google this once it gets the feature fully rolled out, however. Tabs will also be loading up to 10 percent faster now thanks to tab throttling and profile guided optimization, which takes resources from tabs you haven’t used in a while and gives them to those you are using.