Browsing the Internet without tabs today is unimaginable. The era of window browsing, as Internet Explorer used to do, is behind us. Tabs are very useful when opening web pages and despite their obvious RAM consumption problems, we could not live without them. However, when we open many tabs at the same time, having them all in order can be a complicated, even impossible task. And, to help us in this work, Google has just introduced a new feature, now available to everyone, that will help us navigate much better: groups of tabs .
This novelty is not new in the browser. Since the launch of Chrome 78, users who wanted to try it could manually activate it from the flags. Also, Chrome has been using an A / B testing system whereby a very specific group of users had access to this feature.
What’s more, tab groups can’t even be considered a Chrome novelty . Mozilla introduced this feature to its browser several years ago so that its users could use this feature to organize and order their tabs. However, due to little success, the company decided to remove the tabs from Firefox.
Now, Google has decided to make Chrome’s tab groups available to all users.
Tab groups in Chrome for everyone
This feature of the browser is now available to all users of the same. The only requirement that we must meet is that, to use it, we must have the latest stable version of it installed: 85.0.4183.102 (or a later version). The Beta and Canary branches also already have this feature available to their users.
If we have updated Chrome, then the tab groups will already be available without having to do anything else. By right-clicking on any tab we can see a new option called ” Add tab to new group “.
By selecting this option, a new group will automatically be created, with that tab inside. Each group of tabs will be identified by a colored point. If we click on it we can change the color, as well as give the group a name that helps us better identify it.
Once a group is created, we can drag any tab that we have open inside it to put it inside. And we can create other groups to have more groups of ordered tabs.
All the tabs that we open from a group will by default be within the same group. Very useful when we have to open many tabs on the same website, or to carry out the same search. We can move between the tabs as usual, and when the time comes we will even be able to close the entire group of tabs at once.
More functions that should come to this function
This new feature of Google Chrome works, and if we get used to it it can be useful if we often work with dozens of open tabs. However, Google has yet to improve this feature, and we do not know how much effort it will put into adding new utility.
One of the functions that you cannot miss is the possibility of collapsing the groups . Instead of all the tabs occupying their space, this function will allow us to have the whole group as a single tab, and expand it when we need it. At the moment, this function is only available as a flag, but if we want to use it we can activate it from the following link.
chrome://flags/#tab-groups-collapse
Also, this feature still has some bugs that need to be fixed. For example, the errors that appear when customizing a group of tabs do not correspond to the color that you apply to the group.
Let’s hope that Google does not do like Mozilla and ends up eliminating this function from the browser, since the tabs, although they are essential to navigate, are crying out for a renewal. And this does not finish arriving.
