How to organise tabs in Chrome: groups and more

To organise tabs in Chrome you don’t need to install anything at first: pin what is always open, group the rest by task, switch to vertical tabs once you pass fifteen or so, and search before opening another. That sorts out almost any window. An extension becomes necessary at one specific point: when you want to close a group today and reopen it a month from now, or in another browser.

Here are the steps in the order worth applying them. Menu names follow Chrome’s official desktop help.

1. Pin the tabs you never close

Email, calendar, your task tracker: whatever stays open all day shouldn’t take up the same room as something you opened ten minutes ago. Right-click the tab and choose Pin. Pinned tabs are smaller and show only the site’s icon.

Rule of thumb: if a tab has been open for a week and you use it daily, pin it. If it has been open for a week and you haven’t looked at it, close it.

2. Group by task with Chrome tab groups

Chrome tab groups are the main tool for bringing order to a window. Right-click a tab, choose Add tab to group > New group, then give it a name and a colour. To put more tabs in, drag them into the group or repeat the menu and pick the existing group.

What works is grouping by task, not by site: “Database migration” brings together the docs, the provider’s dashboard and the open issue, even though they’re three different domains. Grouping by site (“everything from GitHub”) produces groups that don’t tell you what you were doing.

A short name and a fixed colour per kind of work — say, green for in progress and grey for waiting — makes the tab strip readable at a glance.

3. Collapse and close the groups you aren’t using

Click a group’s name and it collapses: only the label stays in the strip. It’s how you keep three projects open while looking at one.

When you don’t need a group today, choose Close group from its menu. Chrome doesn’t delete it: it keeps it, and you can reopen it from More > Tab groups. If you’re signed in and syncing browsing history and tabs with your Google Account, groups also sync across your devices.

4. Turn on vertical tabs when the strip runs out of room

Past fifteen or twenty tabs, the horizontal strip stops showing titles and you’re left with icons. Chrome has vertical tabs: they move the tab list to the side of the window, where full titles are visible and the list scrolls.

Turn them on by right-clicking empty space in the tab strip > Show Tabs Vertically, or under Settings > Appearance > Tab position > Vertical. The side panel can be resized, and collapsed groups expand when you hover over them. On a wide screen with room to spare at the sides, it’s the change you’ll notice most.

5. Search before you open another tab

Half the clutter is duplicates: the same docs open three times because you couldn’t find them. Tab Search — the icon in the tab strip, or Ctrl+Shift+A (Cmd+Shift+A on Mac) — searches through the tabs you have open. You can also type @tabs in the address bar.

Make it a habit to search first and open second. It saves more tabs than any other habit, and we go into it in too many tabs open.

6. Split projects into named windows

When two pieces of work have nothing to do with each other, a window each works better than two groups in one. Chrome lets you name them: right-click the empty space next to the new-tab button > Name window. With one name per project, you stop opening the wrong window.

To move a tab between them, right-click > Move tab to another window, or drag it out of the strip.

7. Store what you’ll come back to outside the browser

This is where the built-in tools stop. Chrome’s groups live in Chrome and in your profile: you can’t open them in Firefox, search them by what’s inside, or hand them to someone as a list of links. For anything you’ll pick up again weeks later, it’s worth storing it somewhere else.

That’s the gap a tab organiser extension like tabteca fills: it saves the whole window as a named session in your account, or adds the window to a session you already have, and restores it in one click. It runs on Chromium-based browsers — Chrome, Edge, Brave and Opera — and what you save can be viewed from the web app in any browser. What a tool like this actually does is covered in what a tab manager is.

What none of these tools will do for you

Organising doesn’t replace closing. A collapsed group of forty tabs is still forty tabs, and vertical tabs let you fit more, not need more. If you don’t close a task’s group when the task is done, in a month you’ll have the same crowded strip, just colour-coded. And if you close something by mistake, every way back is in how to recover closed tabs.

Frequently asked questions

How do I create tab groups in Chrome? Right-click a tab, choose Add tab to group and then New group. You can give it a name and a colour, and add more tabs by dragging them into the group.

Does Chrome have vertical tabs? Yes, on desktop. Turn them on by right-clicking the tab strip and choosing Show Tabs Vertically, or under Settings, Appearance, Tab position. The list moves to the side of the window with full titles.

Do tab groups disappear when I close Chrome? A group closed with Close group isn’t deleted: it stays saved and reopens from More, Tab groups. If you sync browsing history and tabs with your Google Account, it also syncs across your devices.

Do I need an extension to organise tabs? To tidy a window, no: pinning, grouping and searching cover almost everything. An extension adds what Chrome doesn’t do: storing sessions outside your profile, viewing them from another browser and sharing them as a list of links.

Does tabteca work in Firefox or Safari? The extension doesn’t: it runs on Chrome, Edge, Brave and Opera. Saved sessions can still be opened from the tabteca web app in any browser.