Hands-on with Google Chrome’s slick new tab grouping feature

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  Chrome's new tab group feature. It's pretty neat. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Hello, fellow tab hoarders. My name is Ron Amadeo and I have a problem. I have 31 tabs open right now, and I'm not even doing anything particularly complicated. I'm not really sure where these tabs came from or how they opened, but every single one is special to me and, no, I'm not closing them. In a world where everything is a webpage, tabs just seem to quickly pile up no matter what I do. Chrome is working on a solution that could help me be a little more organized: tab grouping, a feature that recently showed up in the beta version of Chrome.

While tab grouping has been done before, it has never been quite as slick as the current implementation in Chrome's beta channel. Just as Chrome redefined what a tab bar and a browser should look like, after messing around with this for a day, it feels like the UI for this tab grouping feature is going to eventually be copied by every other browser.

Using the feature is pretty easy: right-click on a tab, click "Add to new group," and a gray dot will appear next to the tab. You can then right-click on the gray dot, pick a new color, and give it a name. With a name, the group label looks a lot like a tab, and it blends in well with the tab bar. The really slick thing is the color coordination-the current tab gets outlined in the tab group color, and that colored line continues across the tab bar covering every tab in that tab group. This makes it easy to tell which tabs are in what group, without being too distracting.

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