Hide Chrome Tab Groups With This Great Beta Feature
Google recently introduced Tab Groups to Chrome . As I wrote in our guide on configuring them before fully deploying them, they are an incredibly useful way to make your vast browser tabs a little more organized. At least adding some color to Chrome doesn’t hurt; I love the way the tab groups look. Now let’s make them better.
The only drawback of group tabs – in its current implementation – is that you will still see many tabs overflowing the browser window. In fact, you’ll have more, as your tab groups will now have an additional tab with that group’s color – perhaps even the name of your tab group if you’re super-organized.
Luckily, you can enable a feature in Chrome flags that will allow you to collapse and expand tabs with a single click. If your browser is as loaded as mine, you will love it.
To get started, you’ll first need to install Chrome Canary – a less stable version of the browser that gives you access to all the fun hidden features that Google tests. Once you get started with this, enter chrome://flags/#tab-groups into the address bar. Make sure you enable Tab Groups as well as Collapse Tab Groups :
Now create a tab group as usual and give it a name. By left clicking on this name, you can open and close the entire block of tabs at once, as you will see in this animation from Techdows :
That’s all! It’s a shame that you need to run Canary for this function. While the flag is present in the beta version of Chrome, the feature does not work if you enable it. (At least I couldn’t get it to do anything in my Beta Chrome browser, whereas collapsing and expanding groups of tabs worked fine in Canary.) On the other hand, this all bodes well for a feature that in some way moment will appear in the stable version of Chrome. in the future – and boy, it’s convenient.