Google Chrome

Google may be adding ‘Tab Groups’ to Chrome for organizing tabs w/ ‘different tasks’

Ben Schoon | Nov 21 2018 - 6:24 am PT

The tabbed interface is an intuitive and effective way to interact with something like a web browser. However, especially if you make your living staring at a browser all day, you’ve probably had times where there were just too many tabs to keep straight. To help with that, it looks like Google is adding Tab Groups to Chrome.

First spotted by Chrome Story, a code change request and an associated bug report reveal a new feature that Google is experimenting with for Chrome. Tab Groups, as they’re called, appear to be designed to make tab organization easier within Chrome. It appears that Tab Groups are still in early development for Chrome, but we’ve already got a description of the functionality.

Tab Groups – Organize tabs into visually distinct groups, e.g. to separate tabs “associated with different tasks.”

From our understanding, this feature would allow users to create a sort of “folder” to house a select group of tabs and keep them in one place. Alternatively, it could also be a bookmarks-esque feature which keeps commonly used sites in one location for easy access.

We don’t know exactly what this will look like just yet, but there are Chrome extensions already available that offer a similar functionality.

There’s no timeline known for this feature’s arrival just yet, but we can certainly hope that it will land sometime in the next few weeks in the Canary version of Chrome.