How to effortlessly manage multiple accounts with tabs in the Gmail PWA

Of the messaging and productivity apps I keep open on my desktop on any given day, there’s no question that Gmail is at the top of the priority list. Between personal and work messages, I get a lot of email and I like trying my best to keep it sorted and reined in as much as possible. Keeping it front and center is a necessary thing if I hope to keep that workflow a reality.

Here’s the problem: Gmail in a windowed/PWA form has a pretty severe limitation if you use multiple accounts. Though the primary account opens in a nice, clean app window, changing accounts opens up a new and separate Chrome instance. It’s a strange behavior that has caused me to forget Gmail as a PWA and I’ve largely reverted to using it in a few tabs in one of my many browser windows. It’s not the best, but it gets the job done.

My biggest issue with this setup is the fact that I end up losing which Chrome window contains my Gmail tabs and when I need to quickly jump to them, I have to hunt around a bit. It’s a small nag, sure, but when it is an annoyance that I have to deal with over and over again, it makes me far less likely to keep an eye on my inbox, and that leads to messages piling up over the course of the work day.

The solution is behind a couple flags

The nice thing about a PWA or website in its own window is the ability to quickly get back to it when you need it. Whether it’s via the overview button/gesture or an ALT+TAB navigation, it’s much easier to spot and get to an app when you can clearly see the app icon amidst all your stuff. As you can see in the image below, it is very easy to find and get to Gmail when it is in its own window. This isn’t true when it is a tab in a Chrome window with other tabs open.

While what I’m about to show you today won’t let you quick-switch accounts the way you can in the Gmail Android app, there is a simple solution to this problem that lays hidden behind a couple flags that you can flip on right now. It only takes a second, and after you turn them on, you’ll have a Gmail PWA that can handle all the accounts you need in one, clean window.

By enabling the flags at chrome://flags/#enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip and chrome://flags/#enable-desktop-pwas-tab-strip-settings (and pushing the restart button), you’ll have the ability to group tabs in the Gmail PWA (and any other PWA that can take advantage) without the app opening up a new Chrome instance. To make it work after the flags are on, you’ll need to right-click on the app icon and select the now-available option to open this app as a New tabbed window.

Once these steps are complete, you can open the Gmail PWA, click your account avatar, select an additional account, and the PWA will open a new tab for that account in the same window. And the beauty of it is, you can interact with those tabs in the exact same way as you would in a standard Chrome window.

You can 3-finger swipe between them with the trackpad, close any of them with a scroll wheel or 3-finger click, or drag and rearrange them with ease. It is an uncluttered, simple, useful way to deal with multiple Gmail accounts in the PWA that I know I’ll be using from this point forward. I’ve been waiting for this feature to finally arrive, and though it is still behind a flag for now, it works exactly as you’d expect. I’m hoping it arrives out of the box in the next few Stable Channel updates, but for now, a couple flags are all that stand in front of you being able to leverage multiple accounts in the Gmail PWA like a pro.