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Google has introduced a tab grouping feature that you can use to keep your Chrome web browser more organized. Learn how to enable and use this feature in Chrome 83.
Staying organized at work can help you be more productive because you do not have to waste time searching for items you need. Google has introduced a new feature called Tab Groups that you can use to keep your Chrome web browser more organized. With this feature, you can quickly put web pages into groups and give each group its own name. For example, you might put business articles you want to read into two groups labeled “Read asap” and “Read later”. The web pages within each group are automatically clustered together and assigned a color, which you can customize.
Before you can use Tab Groups, though, you first need to enable the feature.
Enabling Tab Groups
Google introduced the Tab Groups feature in Chrome 83, which the company released on May 19, 2020. You can check to see which Chrome version you are running by following these steps:
The page that appears will display the version number. If it is not the most recent version, you will be given the option to update it.
Even if you have Chrome 83, though, Tab Groups might not be enabled by default in your browser yet. Because Version 83 is a massive update, Google is slowly rolling out some of the new features over time, according to industry experts. Tab Groups is one of the features being enabled gradually. “Chrome’s stability and performance are important to us, so we’re releasing Tab Groups slowly,” said one of the engineers who worked on Chrome 83.
Fortunately, you can easily enable Tab Groups if it hasn’t been turned on by default in your browser yet. Follow these steps:
Tab groups are currently supported on Chrome 83 browsers running on Windows, Mac, Chrome OS, and Linux desktop computers.
Creating and Populating Tab Groups
Creating and populating tab groups is simple. Suppose you are responsible for finding and purchasing office supplies and equipment so you want to create groups for the retail and review sites you often visit. Here is how to create these groups and populate them:
Figure 3 shows an example of what the resulting two groups might look like.
There are other ways you can add sites to groups. For instance, you can drag a site’s tab into the desired group. Alternatively, you can click a group’s label, select “New tab in group”, and navigate to the desired site in the new tab.
If you want to change the order in which the sites appear in the groups, you can rearrange them by dragging a site’s tab to the desired position. You can also change the order of the groups on the tab bar by dragging a group’s label to the desired spot.
In the future, Google is planning to add the ability to collapse and expand tab groups as needed. This will help save space on the tab bar.
Removing Sites and Deleting Groups
Just like with adding sites, you can remove a site from a group several ways. If you want to remove a web page from a group but keep the page open, you can right-click its tab and select “Remove from group”. Alternatively, you can drag the tab out of the group. If you want to remove a web page from the group and close its tab, you just need to click the tab’s “x”.
To delete a group, you can do one of the following:
The last method brings to light an important caveat. If you want your groups to remain intact after you close the browser, you might need to change a browser setting:
If the “Open the New Tab page” (the default) or “Open a specific page or set of pages” option is selected for the “On startup” setting, your groups will disappear when you close your browser.
A Helpful but Possibly Disabled Feature
Tab groups can help you keep your browser organized. However, at the time of this writing, Google hasn’t enabled it by default in all instances of Chrome 83 yet. As a result, it might take a bit more effort to get it up and running. If you have any questions or need help in getting the Tab Groups feature working in your Chrome browser, contact us.
google_chrome flickr photo by jibunkaiwai shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license