Your recently closed Tab Groups in Chrome will soon appear in Tab Search for easy access

Not long ago, Chrome Canary added the ability to pull up your recently closed Tab Groups via the History menu in the browser’s settings. It turns out that it’s a fine enough makeshift way to ‘store’ Tab Groups for later in a similar way to that of Toby Tab Manager – at least for now. We’re hoping to eventually see Tab Groups integrated into the Chrome new tab page or even into something like Chrome Memories or Assistant Memory.

Our friend Leopeva64 over on Reddit has discovered a new Chromium commit that shows that Chrome Canary will soon also allow you to call up recently closed Tab Groups via the Tab Search button at the top of the UI (see below). In addition to the recently closed tabs, you’ll see a Tab Group icon followed by your group’s name and the number of tabs that existed therein before you closed it. Upon clicking this, the entire Tab Group will automatically be restored – color and all.

Tab Search: Recently Closed Tab Group list item

Adds Tab Group list items to the ‘Recently Closed’ section of the Tab Search list.

Chromium Repository

If I’m honest, I hadn’t thought about this approach either. I was so caught up on the potential for Assistant Memory and other means for recreating a Toby-like experience that I’d missed the obvious two choices for this feature – History and Tab Search. It makes so much sense and I’m excited to receive this when it hits Stable.

My only real concern is that if you close enough tabs after you destroy a Tab Group, you’ll eventually lose the ability to restore the groups themselves. Tab Search only stores so many items in its backlog. This is where I believe the combination of Tab Search and History will come in handy. If something gets pushed out of your Tab Search, you can just visit the browser history page to look for an old Tab Group, and that’s good enough, I think.