If you pride yourself on organization in all things, tab grouping in Google Chrome is probably one of your favorite things ever (though if you turn tab groups off, we won't judge). Then again, it feels like the majority of Android users end up opening heaps of tabs on top of each other without a second thought, and only end up engaging with groups by accident. Wherever your felings on them lie, Google is now showing tab groups a little love, as it finally gets smart about how Chrome tallies them up.

The old way tab groups were counted

Tab groups on Android are a relatively new concept, introduced in February last year to a bit of a lukewarm reception. But regardless of how you feel about them, we'd at least expect them to operate in a way that makes sense. So far, though, when counting your open tabs, Chrome treated each group as just one single tab.

With the release of Chrome 106 this week, 9to5Google has noticed that Chrome's tab-counting logic has been updated such that individual tab within groups are finally tallied correctly, painting a more realistic picture of how much stuff you have going on in the background — not to mention the system resources Chrome is using up. Needless to say, the shell that contains each tab group doesn’t itself count as a tab.

The updated tab count

You'll find that updated count of all open tabs right where it's been, up by the Omnibox, but now offering a correct reading. Chrome 106 is available in the stable channel through the Google Play Store, and if you haven't updated yet, there's no time like the present.