Chrome 95 lets you save tab groups, improves security payments, and more

Chrome 94 introduced the official Sharing Hub, HTTPS-First Mode, a “What’s New” page so you can see new features and details the moment they’re available, a Settings page redesign, and more. Now, we’re seeing Chrome 95 begin its rollout, and with it, the ability to save tab groups for later, improvements to security payments, some other developer feature changes. Let’s take a look at what you’ll see that’s different after you update!

Improved Security Payments

In an effort to streamline web payments and to make them more secure by default, the developers have introduced a new WebAuthn extension that will let banks and other payment authorizers to approve or deny requests made as you checkout via online merchants. By placing more power in the hands of the source where your money is being taken from in order to complete the transactions – the banks – greater security can eventually become the foundation for future eCommerce efforts in Chrome.

Set Web Apps as Defaults

Chrome will now allow web applications to be used as URL handlers, which means that any PWA can be set as the default for specific types of links or files! Now that this is baked directly into Chrome, it will require no extra work on behalf of third-party developers like it used to. Below, you can see an example of this. It looks just like when you must select an app on your Android phone or Windows computer to open a file or link with, only now, it’s built right into the web!

Save tab groups

My favorite update with Chrome 95 is the ability to save tab groups for later. Right-clicking an existing tab group will now present you with a “Save group” toggle. Once saved, your tab group can be closed entirely, and then re-opened from the Tab Search section at the top-right of the browser just near your minimize button. These tab groups will eventually get swallowed up though by other history items like individual site visits. Adding to that, tab groups still don’t appear in History, even though Google is implementing Journeys there, but that feature is coming and already appears on Chrome Canary.

Other Improvements

There are many other improvements that come with Chrome 95 like scrolling screenshots (if you activate the #scroll-capture flag), but the ones we highlighted were among the most exciting for those who aren’t developers. If you are, however, you can look forward to a color eyedropper tool for web apps, the File System Access API being replaced with the Storage Foundation API, and unfortunately, FTP URLs being removed from the browser entirely. In the past, Google removed FTP capabilities, and now it’s just cleaning up loose ends with the URLs. Check out the video below to learn more about URLPattern, origin trials, and more.