Update your Edge Chromium browser today, and you’ll have a fun question about whether you want to enable the browser’s new vertical tabs feature. As someone who always likes to try new things, I decided to accept the suggestion of my browser.
This of course gave me a pretty monstrous list of tabs on the left side of my browser. (Yes I really need to declutter—It’s just a small crop of the list that fills the entire vertical space of my 1440p screen.)
You will notice that all my links from Reddit have cracked together. This is intentional: I’ve been looking for ways to make the vertical tab a little more manageable –since it now feels more like an outline than a wasteland of tabs living on top of my browser – and I ran into a few trickso consider testing the new interface.
G / O Media can get a commission
Before I get started, you should know that the default bar of your sidebar does not have to be permanent. Click on the small “<” arrow in the upper right corner of your tab bar the whole thing collapses in a series of icons. Move the mouse over them, and your tabs will expand. I admit, I do not find it the most useful setup for productivity, but it does at least make my browser look very clean.
As for the organizational heels, I recommend rand: // vlae in your browser’s address bar and enable three different flags:
- # edge-tab groups: Allow users to organize tabs into visually different groups, for example, to separate tabs associated with different tasks.
- # edge-tab-groups-auto-create: Automatically create user groups when tab groups are enabled.
- # edge-tab-group-collapse: Allows tab group to collapse and expand when tab groups are enabled.
It will do nothing for the open tabs, but it will shall throw new tabs from the same domain into a handy tab group that you can collapse and expand at will. Although you’re still able to juggle your tab bar, you can at least group the tabs to better manage yourself.
Another approach you can take – replace or in addition to the “groups” feature – is to use an extension organize your list of open tabs. I like Tab Organizer, which automatically sorts all your tabs by URL. The extension will automatically sort your tabs when you press a keyboard on the keyboard, but I find this more useful set it to auto-sort tabs according to time intervals. Out of sight, out of mind.
Finally there are two more browser flags you can do enable for nice, not because it will help you keep your tabs organized. Pull up rand: // vlae / again and turn on:
- # tab hovercards: Enables a tab with tab information to be visible when you move a tab. This will replace tabs for tabs.
- # tab-floating-map images: Displays a preview image in the tabs, if the tabs are enabled.
Well, when you soar with your mouse over any of your tabs in your vertical bar, you will get a beautiful picture pop-up window that gives you the full title of the website and a preview image:
That being said, I’m still waiting for the biggest customization of all – a way to resize the vertical page bar so I can see a little more of the name of a website by default. It was possible then Microsoft has tested the feature in beta versions of Edge Chromium, so hopefully it will come back sometime.