Chrome could soon make tab overload a lot easier to manage

Google Chrome is finally learning a trick that rivals like Firefox and Vivaldi have mastered for a few years now. Soon after (finally) giving us vertical tabs to stack all our open webpages neatly along the side, Chrome is learning a thing or two about making its traditional horizontal tab feel a lot more manageable, especially for those who keep several tabs open at once.

The tech giant is testing a new horizontally scrollable tab bar, which should make it easier to navigate all open webpages once the tab strip fills up.

Google announced the development in a new support post, and although the functionality isn’t live for all just yet, trying it out is as simple as enabling a Chrome Canary flag.

Note that this wouldn’t really be useful for you if you’re someone who only has about a dozen tabs open at once. It’s for people who keep hundreds of tabs open at once.

In regular view, opening more pages than what the tab strip can fit will result in new tabs being hidden out of sight. That doesn’t necessarily change with horizontal scrolling, but what does change is how you access those hidden tabs.

With the in-testing feature enabled, simply hovering your cursor over the tab strip and scrolling with your mouse wheel will let you horizontally scroll through all open tabs. There are also dedicated arrows that let you scroll through without using a mouse’s scroll wheel, as seen in the image below.

There’s also an option to pin and unpin the arrow buttons in the strip’s right-click menu. Speaking of, your pinned tabs won’t disappear as you scroll. Pinned tabs will have a dedicated section on the left side of the tab strip, which, according to Google, can expand to occupy up to 50% of the tab bar’s available width.

If this sounds like a feature that’ll benefit your Chrome workflow, here’s how you can try it out now.

You’ll need Google’s experimental browser, Chrome Canary. Once downloaded and installed, simply head to chrome://flags/ and search for “Tab Strip Unification.” Enable the flag and relaunch the browser when prompted. That’s pretty much it. You should then be able to fill up the tab strip and seamlessly scroll through it.

Considering how polished the Canary experience feels, it is likely that the feature will make its way to stable Chrome. When that happens, though, remains unclear.