Organize Your Chrome Tabs!

Google Chrome is always releasing updates with new features, but sometimes they get lost in the shuffle and if you don't know about them, you might be missing out on some really great functionality. I thought this holiday weekend would be a good time to focus on helping you become more organized and efficient with Chrome features you may not know existed.

Take a look at your Google Chrome window. How many tabs do you have open right now? It's a pretty slow day for me today, so right now, I have 19 open. Some days I have so many that I can't see anything except the icons. And some days I have multiple windows, each with a bunch of tabs. If you're like me, check out these three useful features that you might now know about!

Pinned Tabs

These have been around for a while - actually since 2010! Let's say you have specific websites that you always have open and you don't want to accidentally close. For me, that's Securly Pass, Google Calendar, and Google Drive. For you, maybe Google Classroom is part of that list. When you "pin" a tab by right clicking on a tab and choosing "Pin", it locks it to the left side of your tabs and takes away the "x" to close the tab so you don't accidentally close it. It also makes them smaller so they don't take up as much screen real estate:

Tab Groups

This one is slightly newer, but still came out 6 years ago in 2020. If you're working on a specific project that has 5 or 6 tabs related to it and then you decide to take a break from it for a day or two...you might decide it's easier to keep the tabs open instead of having to find them all again later. This is a perfect use-case for Tab Groups! Pick any one of the tabs and right click on it. Choose "Add Tab to New Group" and then give the group a name and a color:

Next, just click and drag the other tabs over until they join into the group - you'll see the color outline go around the tabs as they get added to the group. And then when you click the group title, they will all "hide":

Even better...if you don't need them right now, you can now right click on the tab group and choose to close the entire group. You can still access them later from your Bookmarks Bar!

Show Tabs Vertically

This one is actually new and just came out earlier this year. If you have so many tabs across the top that you can't actually tell what is what, you might want to move your tabs to the left side of your screen. To do that, right click anywhere in your tabs bar and choose "Show Tabs Vertically." I'm going to be honest with you...it's a MAJOR shift. It will take some getting used to. But it actually makes it even easier to see the things we just set up above. If you have pinned tabs, they show up at the top of the list and the groups are highlighted with your selected color:

And if that takes up too much space on your screen, you can click the little "Collapse Tabs" button at the top to shift it out of the way when you don't need it. When you bring your mouse over to the tab list, it auto expands!

If you decide you don't like the view - just right click in the tab area again and choose "Show Tabs Horizontally."

Take some time to explore these features and see if you can increase your productivity!