At long last, Google’s Tab Groups actually save, and it’s the final piece to my productivity puzzle

Two months ago, I grumbled about how Chrome’s much-touted Tab Groups Save feature was, to put it bluntly, completely busted and useless. It promised to let users save groups of tabs, collapse them, and then restore them later. However, not every online find belongs on your Reading List. Moreover, many tabs, particularly those used for research or what I like to call “living tabs,” shouldn’t just be shoved away into the often-ignored Bookmarks folder.

The excitement I felt for Tab Groups Save was genuine. The idea of being able to collapse tabs without losing them and, in the process, saving some RAM on my computer? It sounded almost too good to be true. When combined with bookmarks, Google Collections or the “Saved” feature, and the Reading List, it seemed like I was on the brink of achieving a productivity nirvana. But there was a catch—Tab Groups needed to work.

At the start, instead of neatly saving to the bookmarks bar as colorful groups, these tab groups would just crash the browser. Fast forward a bit, and while they did start saving correctly, the moment you ended the Chrome.exe process in the task manager, those grouped tabs vanished forever. It felt like a glimmer of hope when Google introduced an option in the browser’s settings, aiming to sync these groups directly to your Google account, which I also wrote about.

Today, after nearly resigning myself to the fact that this feature might never meet expectations, I gave it another shot. And to my delight, it worked! Tab Groups now reliably save to the bookmark bar. They even reappear after restoring a session or after Chrome has been forcibly closed.

This means that even if you don’t resume your browsing session after a crash or a forced termination, those saved Tab Groups are right there on the Bookmarks Bar, waiting to be accessed and restored. So, for those who’ve been waiting for this feature to get its act together – and I know there were many of you since we spoke about it in the comments of my previous articles – it’s time! Let me know in the comments if you plan on using Tab Groups now that they’re not, well, completely useless.