How to Improve Vertical Tabs in Edge Chromium
Refresh your Edge Chromium browser today and you will get a funny little prompt asking if you want to enable the new vertical tabs feature in your browser. As someone who always loves to try new things, I decided to follow the advice of my browser.
This, of course, gave me a rather monstrous list of tabs on the left side of my browser. (Yes, I really need to get rid of the clutter – this is just a small portion of the list taking up the entire vertical space of my 1440p display.)
You will notice that all of my Reddit links are mixed. This is intentional: I was looking for ways to make the vertical tab bar more manageable – as it now looks more like an outline than a wasteland of tabs that lives on top of my browser – and I came across a few tricks to keep in mind when testing the new interface.
Before I start, be aware that the appearance of your default sidebar doesn’t have to be constant. Click the little “<“ arrow in the upper right corner of the tab bar to collapse it all into a series of icons. Hover over them and your tabs will expand. I admit I don’t find this setting the most useful for improving performance, but at least it makes my browser very clean.
For organizational hacks, I recommend entering edge: // flags into your browser’s address bar and enabling three different flags:
- # edge-tab-groups: Allows users to organize tabs into visually distinct groups, for example to separate tabs related to different tasks.
- # edge-tab-groups-auto-create: Automatically creates groups for users if tab groups are enabled.
- # edge-tab-groups-collapse: Allows a tab group to be collapsible and expandable if tab groups are enabled.
They won’t do anything for the tabs you already have, but will drag and drop new tabs you create from the same domain into a handy tab group that you can collapse and expand as you wish. While you can still clutter up your tab bar, at least grouping tabs will help you manage it a little better.
Another approach that you can take — replacing or supplementing the “groups” function — is to use an extension to organize the list of open tabs. I love the Tab Organizer , which automatically sorts all your tabs by URL. The extension will automatically sort your tabs whenever you press a keyboard hotkey, but I find it more useful to set it to automatically sort your tabs by time intervals. Out of sight, out of mind.
Finally, there are two more browser checkboxes that you can turn on for fun, not because they’ll help you organize your tabs. Pull edge: // flags / again and include:
- # tab-hover-cards: allows you to display a pop-up window containing tab information when you hover over the tab. This will replace tooltips for tabs.
- # tab-hover-card-images: Shows a preview image in tab-hover cards if tab-hover cards are enabled.
Now, when you hover your mouse over any of the tabs in the vertical bar, you get a nice popup that displays the full site name and a preview of the image:
However, I’m still waiting for the biggest tweak – a way to resize the vertical tab bar so that I can see a little more of the default site name. This was possible when Microsoft tested this feature in beta versions of Edge Chromium, so hopefully it will come back at some point.