Google Chrome gets vertical tabs and immersive reading mode

Google Chrome on desktop is getting two long-awaited features. These included vertical tabs as well as a new immersive reading mode. Both of these features have been available on other browsers for a while now so Chrome is late to the party as usual, but better late than never.

The vertical tabs feature is exactly what it sounds like. Instead of having all tabs appear in a row at the top of the browser, they appear in a vertical stack on the side. This allows you to see a lot more tabs at once than what can fit in a horizontal row, and the column can be collapsed to take less space. This frees up vertical room in the browser, which is useful as most computers have a lot less vertical room on their widescreen monitors than horizontal space.

The other feature being added is an update to an existing feature called reading mode. Reading mode in Chrome worked differently, and honestly, rather oddly. Instead of opening on top of the current page as it works on other browsers, it would open in a split view on the side. The new reading mode works as you'd expect it to, taking up the entire screen and covering up the entire original page and all of its distracting elements with it.

Neither features were available in the current 147.0.7727.56 build at the time of writing but should be rolling out over the next few days.