Joggling bazillions of open tabs have always been an issue in Chrome. Unlike Firefox or Safari, the Google browser does not make the tabstrip to browse – tabs only get smaller until you can only distinguish them by favicon, and the real tabs will even start to disappear at some point (I was already there , trust me). Google has introduced tab groups to alleviate the problem, but the company has long wanted to introduce a browsable page strip as an alternative. And in Chrome version 88 you can finally enable the first version of a flag tab via a flag.
If you’ve been wondering, there are no ads, because I have Scroll.com.
The flag in question has the real name “Scrollable TabStrip” and can be obtained by searching for the term chrome: // flags. If you want to use buttons to scroll left and right next to your touchpad or scroll wheel, you can also enable the “Scrollable TabStrip Buttons” flag. After restarting your browser, the tab bar can scroll as soon as you open a certain amount of web pages, though the tabs will only shrink in width to make more space before you can rotate them. We can confirm this behavior on macOS and Windows, but the flag does not work properly on Chrome OS yet. We could not test it on Linux, so your mileage may differ there.
Chrome Tab tab in Chrome Canary Version 90 tests shrinking behavior preferences. Source: Reddit.
The sliding tab strip was first noticed in October 2020, when the long-existing flag finally started working in Canary version 88 on Windows and macOS. And Google continues to tweak the tabstrip in the latest Canary 90 version, as reported by a Redditor. The company is experimenting with different tab widths available under the “Tab Roll” flag to test which size is the perfect compromise between information density and readability.