Chrome adds scrollable overview mode via new “Tab Strip” feature

The Chrome browser and its sibling OS have seen a lot of changes over the past few years. Many of the changes happen under the hood while others have molded and sculpted the look and feel of browser. Material Design is constantly evolving and the Chrome’s UI has benefited from much of the work from that department. Other updates, such as Hover Tab Preview, combine design features with workflow enhancements for a smoother user experience.

As cool as the Hover Tab Image Preview is, a recent update headed to Chrome and Chrome OS Stable builds aims to add a completely new dimension to tab management. As Chrome Story’s Dinsan Francis discovered, the new “Tab Strips” flag in Chrome will give users an overview function to navigate and reorder open tabs in an entirely new manner.

Originally spotted in the Canary build of Chrome, I’ve discovered the feature is actually hiding behind flags in the Beta channel of Chrome OS. WebUI tab strip enables the feature and New tabstrip animations & Scrollable TabStrip add the smooth animations and ability to scroll left and right through the tab images when they overflow past the edge of the screen. Check out the video below to see the “tab strip” feature in action

When enabled, an additional “new tab” button is added to the right of the bookmarks bar along with a caret icon that opens the overview mode. When you have more tabs open than will fit on your display, you can scroll left and right with a simple two-finger swipe. It isn’t working in Chrome OS Beta but a video from 9to5Google’s Ben Schoon shows the ability to drag the tabs in the strip around to reorder them as you please.

As I mentioned before, the Hover Tab Image Preview is handy but this “tab strips” overview mode is a much more useful addition to the Chrome’s toolbox. Still a work in progress, tab strips are working quite smoothly but the addition of a keyboard shortcut would make it a practically perfect update to my workflow. If you’re interested in trying this out on a PC, you can download Chrome Canary for Windows and enable the flags below by pointing your browser to chrome://flags.

#webui-tab-strip

#new-tabstrip-animation

#scrollable-tabstrip

If you’re on a Chromebook, you can head over to the Beta channel to give it a try. Before you do, make sure to check out Robby’s video about switching channels.

Source: Chrome Story