Google first announced that in September 2019 they were adding a grid layout and a grouping of tabs in Chrome on Android. Since then, the company has rolled out this new interface for multiple Chrome users. Until recently, however, the interface was not available to a significant portion of the Chrome user base on Android. Google finally introduced the tab layout to a large number of Android users late last week, and if you’m not a fan of the new look, you can disable it as follows:
To disable the layout of the tab grid in Google Chrome on Android, you must first navigate to chrome: // flags in the browser. Once there, search for “grid” and search for the “Tab Schedule Setup” flag. Then tap the drop-down menu button and select “Disabled” from the following list. Chrome will then prompt you to prompt you to restart the browser for the changes to take effect.
Tap the ‘Restart’ button in the lower right corner and wait for the browser to restart. After reloading, you will see that the tab of the tab grid has been disabled. However, all open tabs will still be shown in the new grid layout.
You must restart the browser before the changes will take effect. To do so, open the Recent menu and close Chrome. Then tap the Chrome app icon to reopen the browser. Your tabs should now appear in the older layout.
Note that you will not be able to use the handy new tab grouping feature of Chrome if you return to the old layout. Fortunately, Chrome lets you easily switch to the grid layout by enabling the above flag. Just make sure you restart the browser twice to enable the changes.