You may soon be able to open multiple tabs in standalone web apps on your Chromebook

Tabbed PWAs are a feature that I’ve been enjoying on and off for a year or two on my Chromebook, and I personally think that it should be the default. But before I get into the nitty-gritty, let me first explain what the heck I’m talking about.

In ChromeOS Canary right now, you can enable a developer flag that takes your web app shortcuts that you’ve created and gives them a tabbed strip at the top as you see in the image below from About Chromebooks.

So, instead of having one instance of Twitter, for example, you can have several open simultaneously without the need for multiple separate app windows floating around your desktop. It’s a fantastic concept that comes in handy more with Gmail or Google Keep where you’d need to access multiple Google Accounts at the same time, but it can really be used for whatever you want.

chrome://flags#enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip
chrome://flags:#enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip-settings

Enable these Chrome flags to get the feature working!

Sadly, this feature still hasn’t rolled out to users en masse, and despite it being created all the way back in 2018, it seems it’s just not ready for prime time for some reason. For this reason, it’s been stuck in ChromeOS Canary for a long, long time.

According to XDA Developers, however, the feature may be progressing once more toward release (though that may not be any time soon) as a Chrome Platform Status update says the following as well as showing off a video of tabbed PWAs in action:

Currently PWAs in a standalone window can only have one page open at a time. Some apps expect users to have many pages open at once. Tabbed mode adds a tab strip to standalone web apps that allows multiple tabs to be open at once.

XDA Developers

Developers will apparently have to add support to their web app manifest file for tabs manually, but when I tested it out I noticed two things. First, most web apps that I cared about already had it built in somehow, second, the experience was pretty inconsistent. I constantly had to change windows back to “New tabbed window” by right-clicking them and hovering over the arrow to the right of “New window”. It was a very convenient feature, but very annoying to daily drive, and I’m wondering what’s taking so very long for this essential tool to come to everyone.

From what I gather, just having an official description update to the Chrome Platform Status shows that the feature isn’t dead or stuck, but rather in motion once more. Do you see yourself using tabbed web apps, or do you prefer to open everything in Chrome as tabs? Doing it this way can lead to lots of disorganization, and tabbed PWAs can clean that up quite a bit.