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Google Chrome could make tab group sharing a breeze on Android
The change is one among several improvements for tab groups on Android
Google Chrome is ranked high on the list of the best web browsers for Android, and is the world’s most popular browser by sheer number of users. That’s largely due to the ease and familiarity Chrome offers on every platform — switching from your desktop to an Android tablet doesn’t feel like you’re in alien territory. However, we still miss support for a few critical elements such as extensions and fully-featured tab grouping on mobile. Google is inching ahead, though, and a new flag suggests tab group sharing will soon be simpler.
Chrome for Android is about to fix its biggest tab nightmare
You might be able to restore multiple tabs at once
We’ve all had that moment of accidentally closing one or two Chrome tabs — a simple trip to the browser history is usually enough to fix it. But what if you close an entire window with all your 3,172 tabs or a tab group? The typical response (after screaming your lungs out) is to find a way to salvage whatever you can. Thankfully, Chrome has an option to restore closed tabs. But if you’re using the Android app, you can currently only do it one at a time. Google is reportedly now working on including the option to bulk restore tabs in Chrome for Android.
Chrome Canary 101 takes tab group saving one step closer to completion
Still a work in progress, though
After testing tab groups in various forms for what seemed like ages, Google finally rolled out desktop support for the feature with Chrome Beta version 83 — allowing users to aggregate similar tabs together and label them with a custom name and color. Soon after, the tech giant added the option to collapse tab groups for more space. We've been hearing of a new option to save tab groups, and it looks like Google's making progress with the feature.
About a month ago users on the Chromium repository led a very polite revolt against tab groups in Chrome for Android, declaring that they much preferred the option to simply open a selected link in a new tab directly. A little yellow bird told us that Google has listened to those users, and "Open in new tab" is coming back.
Wow, y'all really hate tab groups in Chrome for Android
A new Chromium bug report hopes to bring back an option to turn them off
Any time a developer releases a new feature, the hope is that users will find it helpful. That isn't always the case. For example: the new tab groups feature in Chrome for Android, which is now the default behavior after being introduced in January. While the grouped tabs initially came with a chrome://flags option to turn it off, that option has been removed, and tab groups are now permanently enabled in all current versions of the browser.
Apple steals not one, but two Chrome features for the iPhone's iOS 15 Safari redesign
Swipe to switch tabs plus a very familiar tab switcher
Apple claimed at WWDC this year that Safari is the "world's fastest browser" — note that not everyone agrees with that, and if the company's claim is true, it's at the cost of not supporting the modern internet and PWA-hostile policies, but you do you Apple. Separately from speed-ranking titles, Safari is also stealing two pretty handy features from Chrome on mobile platforms. As part of a cross-platform redesign that includes iOS 15, Safari will pick up Chrome's swipe-to-switch-tabs feature, plus Chrome's grid tab view. Safari is also getting tab grouping like Chrome, but it sounds like the iPhone will skip that party.
Chrome is getting faster, with better tabs and easier content sharing
Performance improvements of up to 10% should be possible
Today Google is announcing a handful of changes to its popular Chrome browser, including a whole pile of enhancements to tabbed navigation across platforms, the QR code page sharing feature it rolled out last month, the ability to save edited PDFs from right inside Chrome, plus performance improvements that will make the next Chrome release up to 10% faster. As usual for Google, though, some of these changes are older things that already rolled out behind feature flags, but now they're official.
Chrome Beta rolls out support for tab groups on desktop platforms, for real this time
Still no word on when it will arrive on Chrome for Android
Some features in Chrome seem to be cursed to never fully roll out. The bottom-bar 'Duet' mobile interface has been in development for over two years at this point, and support for tab groups on the desktop has been rolled out and pulled back more times than I can count. Thankfully, it seems like tab groups are finally going live, for real this time.
Tab grouping is a feature many Chrome users are excited to get, especially since other browsers have been capable of similar for a while. The feature is still a while away from being released in the stable version of Chrome, but the latest update in the Canary channel includes colors for each group and automatically opening links from the same site in the same group. The Send to Self feature for sharing tabs with Chrome on another device now has a history page.
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Finding yourself with too many tabs open and your computer memory suffering is something that happens to us all, although some more than others — looking at you, Ryne. When you've got too many in one window, something I like to call "Tab City," it can be hard to find what you want. Tab Groups could be Google's solution to this age-old problem.