After 10 years of Chrome chaos, one feature finally gave me control over my tabs

I've been using Chrome for over a decade, and I'd like to think I've discovered most of its secrets. However, despite my proficiency at maximizing the browser's capabilities, tabs remain outside my control.

I usually have 20 to 30 tabs open, which makes me jump between unrelated projects and spend more time looking for the right tab than actually using it.

That's until I discovered Tab Groups. It's given me a way to organize my workflow while largely retaining the way I work.

Instead of trying to keep one giant collection of tabs under control, and generally failing to do so, Chrome lets me group them around what I'm using. It's made a huge improvement in my daily productivity.

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Posts By  Irene Okpanachi

Tab Groups keep my multitasking under control

Everything I need for research stays together

Tab Groups sound like a basic organizational feature, and for what it's worth, it is. But after using it over the last few weeks, I've found it solves a specific problem in my workflow that's critical to how I work.

I no longer have to close things because I'm context switching. Let me explain.

My biggest issue with browser tabs is that I'm usually multitasking. I might be working on a self-hosting-related project, ideating videos, writing a blog post, or discovering some new albums.

My Chrome tab bar gets so cluttered that I can barely see anything beyond favicons. I waste more time sifting through tabs than getting work done.

Now, I create a Tab Group for each project. When I'm researching an article, I have a few pages open. Manufacturer specs, research docs, the usual Google search, and maybe even Gemini Notebook to pull that information together.

Now they all sit inside a tab group. I name it so that I know exactly what the project is, and I can assign it a color for better visibility.

Anytime I want to come back to that selection of tabs, I just click the tab group, expand it, and everything is right there as expected. When I'm moving on to other work, I can collapse it.

The beauty of Tab Groups is that you don't close them out. When you collapse a Tab Group, the individual tabs are still active, just tucked away under the group. This ensures your work isn't closed just because you switched context for a moment.

The same idea applies to projects that run across multiple days. For me, that's usually research for interesting topics to write about, and often technical deep dives.

I don't have to bookmark every source anymore. Tabbing these into a working group lets me open and close them easily without cluttering my browsing experience.

Saved Tab Groups make pulling out recurring tasks much easier

From shopping to music discovery, Tab Groups help me organize everything

Tab Groups aren't new to Chrome, and over the years, Google has worked to improve the experience. Part of that is the ability to save Tab Groups. By default, a Tab Group stays open in memory, but you don't always want that.

There's a functional difference between grouping tabs that are open right now and keeping a collection of tabs for an ongoing project.

I use the latter more often. Chrome lets me save Tab Groups, so I can close them and reopen them later without rebuilding the group from scratch.

I follow several music blogs, and once a week, I scroll through them to discover new albums and artists. These blogs now sit in a Tab Group. I can tap one button and pull them all up without opening each website manually.

These tab groups sync across devices if you turn on Chrome sync, so you get the same productivity benefits across all your touchpoints.

Similarly, I use Tab Groups to save my favorite shopping websites. The convenience adds up over time, and being able to pop open your favorite websites with one click is extremely helpful.

Part of that convenience is the color coding system. As I mentioned earlier, you can assign color codes to Tab Groups.

Tab Groups gave my tabs some much-needed structure

Now, before you think I've ditched regular tabs, I haven't. As I write this, I have a dozen or so tabs open on my browser. But that's a serious upgrade over the multiples I'd have opened earlier.

I've not suddenly become hyper-organized. But since I started using Tab Groups, I have much more control over my tabs and, more importantly, tabs have much more structure.

My projects and research stay together in one place, and I know where to go when I need something.

After a decade or more of Chrome use, discovering this one feature might've been the biggest productivity upgrade I could've made.