Upcoming Chrome collapsing tab groups will take your tab management to the next level

We’ve known that tab groups are headed to their official unveiling in Chrome 83, but that hasn’t stopped users from jumping in on the action right now in Chrome 81. The new, highly-anticipated new feature has been around, hiding in plain sight behind a simple flag for quite some time now. Gabriel wrote about this just last week and if you’d like to get caught up on what all the fuss is about, I’d suggest giving that post a quick read.

While I like the idea of tab groups, I routinely keep my tabs cleaned up and in order so I don’t lose track of where I am. Grouping my handful of tabs I have open at any given moment wouldn’t help my situation too much, but I know there are plenty of you out there that simply don’t want to mess with constantly keeping your tabs under constant surveilance. For those of you like that, tab groups take a nice step in the direction of helping you visually group, identify, and label your hoarded tabs.

For me, however, I think the reason I keep tabs under control is to keep my desktop easily glanceable. Sure, grouping tabs helps this a bit, but you still have a slew of information up there to deal with even when your tabs are grouped and labeled. It still feels a tad cluttered and a tad overwhelming to me. Thankfully, along with tab grouping, Google is bringing a feature that will allow for a much cleaner look: collapsing tab groups.

Spotted by Techdows, this new feature is currently in Canary (though the flag is also present, but not working currently in the Beta Channel) and I’m hoping the kinks are ironed out in time for a Chrome 83 launch, perhaps still behind a flag. It works as expected, allowing users to click on the label of their new tab group to collapse and expand that group. Check out the GIF below to see this in action.

So, imagine instead of seeing tons of color-coded tabs across the top of your browser, you saw just your labels. In this way, you will be able to keep lots of tabs at the ready while keeping a tidy, neat, clean appearance up top as well. For me, this is the sort of tab management I’m looking for and I’d imagine many of you who are already excited about the arrival of tab grouping for Chrome 83 will be even more pumped to have this sort of organizational flexibility at your disposal. We’ll be keeping an eye on this as it moves through the various Chrome channels and, hopefully, we’ll all be testing this out before long.

Shop All The Latest Chromebook Deals