5 ways to declutter your Chrome browser - and take back control of your tab life
Too many tabs make Chrome a bit unwieldy.
Every time I hop over to the Chrome browser, I find myself missing Opera's tab management. That's not exactly a fair comparison: Opera actually has tab management built-in, whereas Chrome's offerings are a mere pittance.
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This doesn't mean that Chrome users are out of luck. If Chrome is your browser of choice and you'd like to ease the headache of far too many tabs and no way to corral them, let me help you with five easy tips that will go a long way to managing that ever-growing list of tabs.
Ready to get organized? Let's do it.
1. Add the Workspaces extension
Before I tell you about this extension, understand that it is not nearly as good as what Opera offers. While Opera lets you manage Workspaces within a single window, the Chrome Workspaces extension opens your Workspaces in individual windows. For example, I have Workspaces for Writing, News, Shopping, Social, and Creative. If I click the extension icon and select one of those Workspaces, it opens a new window with a label for that particular Workspace.
The Workspaces extension has been installed and I've created several workspaces.
I can then open as many tabs as I need related to that workspace. Click yet another Workspace and Chrome opens another window. It would be nice if all Workspaces could be housed in a single window and be easily selected, but Chrome doesn't exactly work that way (and neither does the extension). The other issue is that you can't move a tab from one Workspace to another without dragging the tab from one window to another.
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You can install the Workspaces extension from the Chrome web store for free. If this one doesn't satisfy you, search the store for workspaces and you'll find other options.
2. Use Tab Groups
Tab Groups is Chrome's official tab management feature. If I'm being honest, it's not all that great, but it's something. The funny thing about Tab Groups is that it works similarly to the Workspace extension. The main difference is that it places new groups in the same window. This allows you to organize your tabs by group (and even move tabs from one group to another with by right-clicking and selecting "Add Tab to Group"), but with a lot of tabs open, your Chrome window can get really crowded.
I've created a tab group for News and and one for Social networking.
For me, the purpose of tab management is not only to work with tabs more efficiently, but to avoid clutter. Unfortunately, this is the best tab management option Google can offer. Tab Groups does have one nice feature that allows you to save groups. You can save a group by right-clicking the group name and then clicking the On/Off slider until it's in the On position.
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After saving a group, you can recall it by clicking the drop-down arrow in the upper-left corner of the Chrome window and locating the colored dot associated with the tab group you created. It's a bit of a kludgy workaround but once you get it, you'll see that it can save you from considerable headache.
3. Categorize tabs into windows
If you opt to not go with the Workspaces extension, you can at least start categorizing your tabs in their own windows. For example, you might have all of your social networking tabs in one window, all of your news tabs in another window, and all of your productivity tabs in yet another. You can also name each window accordingly. To name a window, right-click the title bar for the window, select Name Window, and give the window a name.
Moving the ZDNET tab to a NEWS window.
The only caveat to this is that the name doesn't appear on the Chrome window. You can see the name if you right-click a tab and then click "Move tab to another window," where the named windows you've created will appear. The other problem is that the window names don't remain after you've closed Chrome, so you'll have to re-create them if you close all your browser windows.
4. Pin tabs
I've been using the pinned tab feature for a long time. I use Pinned tabs in Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Safari, and every browser I install. Pinned tabs allow you to ensure that a tab will always be there, even after you close and re-open the browser. Even better, when you pin a tab, it takes up considerably less space than a regular tab, which means tabs won't get all bunched together and hard to read.
Pinned tabs can save you some real estate in the tabs toolbar.
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To pin a tab, simply right-click the tab in question and select Pin Tab. There is, however, one trick you need to know about. If you have multiple windows open but only have pinned tabs in one of them, you'll lose all of those pinned tabs if you don't close the window with the pinned tabs last.
5. Add tabs to the Reading List
The Reading List is a collection of pages and articles that you want to save for later. Reading List helps you avoid keeping a tab open just so you can remember to read something later.
Two ZDNET articles added to my reading list.
Adding a page to the Reading List is simple: Open a page, right-click its tab, and select "Add Tab to Reading List." The tricky part is viewing the Reading List. To do that, click the three-dot menu button at the top right and then click "Bookmarks and Lists" > Reading List > Show Reading List. A sidebar will appear with every page you've added. You can then pin the Reading List, but it will take up a good amount of screen space, so your best bet is to leave it open until you're finished and then close it.
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Chrome doesn't handle tabs nearly as well as Opera, Vivaldi, Arc, or Edge, but if you're stuck using this particular browser, these tips will help you avoid tab overload.