Joggling bazillions of open tabs has always been a hassle in Chrome. In contrast to Firefox or Safari, the Google browser doesn't make the tabstrip scrollable — tabs just keep getting smaller until you can only tell them apart by favicon, and the rightmost tabs will even start disappearing at some point (I've been there, trust me). Google introduced tab groups to mitigate that problem, but the company has also long been wanting to introduce a scrollable tabstrip as an alternative. And in Chrome version 88, you can finally enable the first version of a scrollable tab bar via a flag.

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The flag in question is aptly named "Scrollable TabStrip" and can be accessed by searching for the term under chrome://flags. If you want to be able to use buttons to scroll left and right in addition to your touchpad or scroll wheel, you can also enable the "Scrollable TabStrip Buttons" flag. Once you've restarted your browser, the tab bar becomes scrollable as soon as you open a certain amount of websites, though the tabs will first shrink in width to make space for more before turning scrollable. We can confirm this behavior on macOS and Windows, but the flag doesn't properly work on Chrome OS just yet. We haven't been able to test it on Linux, so your mileage may vary there.

The Tab Scrolling flag in Chrome Canary version 90 testing shrinking behavior preferences. Source: Reddit.

The scrollable tabstrip was first spotted back in October 2020, when the long-existing flag finally started working in Canary version 88 on Windows and macOS. And Google is continuing to tweak the tabstrip in the latest Canary 90 release, as reported by a Redditor. The company is experimenting with different tab widths available under a "Tab Scrolling" flag, testing which size is the perfect compromise between information density and readability.

Thanks: leopeva64