Managing your tabs in Chrome

How many tabs do you have open in Chrome at the end of the day? Do you ever keep tabs open for days or even weeks because you want to go back to that page? Below are some easy ways to manage your Chrome tabs and not worry about having to keep so many open.

Use and Organize your Bookmarks

If your bookmarks are a mess, you likely won’t use them and just leave tabs open instead. Every tab you have open is using your system resources and they are cluttering up your browser. Here are some tips for organizing your bookmarks. If you don’t want to create a bookmark for something temporary, add it to a Reading List instead.

Create a Reading List

You can add pages to a reading checklist to read later. Once you’ve read them, you can mark them as read or remove them from your list. It seems similar to a bookmark but the Reading List is meant to be temporary. You can open/close the reading list by clicking the Side Panel button, located to the left of your photo in Chrome. 

Add something to the reading list

Option 1: When you are on a webpage, right-click on the tab and choose Add tab to reading list
Option 2: If the reading list Side Panel is open, click the +Add current tab button

Select multiple tabs

You can select multiple tabs and drag them out into a new window or move them to a different window. Why do this? I do this when I have several tabs open that are related to a single project. Press CTRL and click on the tabs you want to select. Once they are selected you can:

• Click and drag them out into a new window
• Press Ctrl+W to close the selected tabs
• Add them to a Group

Group tabs

Keep related pages together in one workspace by creating a tab group. When you create a group, the tabs in your group will all have the same color. You can customize colors, collapse/expand and rearrange groups in your window.

Create a group: Right-click a tab or Ctrl+click on several tabs, click Add tab(s) to new group, Click New Group or click the name of an existing tab group. Click the slider next to Save group.

Rename a group: Right-click the colored circle next to the tab group and change the name of the group.

Recolor a group: Right-click the colored circle next to the tab group and change the color of the group.

Expand/Collapse a group: Click the name or colored circle of the tab group.

Rearrange tab groups: Click and drag a tab group left or right of other open tabs in the window

Pin Tabs

You can pin your most-used tabs so they stay in the upper left corner of your window and not get nudged across the screen as you open new tabs. What’s nice about this feature is that it shrinks the size of the pinned tabs so they take up less room. To Pin a tab, just right-click on a tab and select Pin Tab. A few things to note:

• Any new links you open will always open to the right of all your pinned tabs
• You can’t mix pinned and non-pinned tabs
• To save your pinned tabs, change your Chrome On Start settings to Continue where you left off