All About Interwebz: Google secretly adds a cool new tab feature to Chrome

The arrival of tabs in web browsers may have given us a way of easily keeping more sites open at once, but managing all of these tabs became a problem in its own right.

Over the years, Google has added various new features to Chrome to make it easier to keep on top of a growing tab collection, and there is more on the horizon. A secret option hidden in the nightly build of the browser gives you a great new way to navigate tabs.

Having already added tab grouping and group collapsing, Google is now experimenting with a new scrollable tab bar. This is something that has been available numerous other browsers for some time, but it is only now that Google feels that Chrome users are ready for it.

The ability to scroll through tabs means that there is no need for Chrome to shrink them down to favicons when you have a large number open at once, so tabs are easy to navigate, but also that they are easier to identify. While this is great news for tab addicts, it's not a feature that is available in the main release of Chrome just yet – but you can still try it out.

Keep tabs on it

The scrollable tab bar is something that Google has added to the Canary build of Chrome 88, so – assuming the testing phase goes well and reception from users is good – it should only be a matter of weeks until it lands in the stable build. But if you would like to try it out now, here's what you need to do.

Download yourself a copy of Chrome Canary here, and then use the following steps to enabled tab scrolling:

Launch Chrome and pay a visit to chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip
From the drop-down menu next to the Scrollable TabStrip option, select Enabled
Restart Chrome and you're ready to go