Chrome’s Android app is updated with a new tab switching interface and a new tab grouping feature to help organize open web pages, 9to5Google reports. The new interface and functionality has reportedly appeared for some users after Chrome’s version 88 release last month, but doesn’t seem to be live for everyone yet.
The grid layout replaces the previous interface, consisting of a vertical list of tabs, and is similar to Chrome’s existing iOS tab interface. About six tabs are displayed on the screen at a time and they can be swiped left or right to close them. Incognito tabs are accessible via a small icon at the top of the screen.
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Tabs are similar to a feature available in the desktop version of Chrome since last year, and provide an easier way to organize your tabs. Grouping tabs also gives you a new shortcut to switch between tabs in the same group from a menu that appears at the bottom of the app. On Android, you can organize tabs into groups from the grid layout screen by dragging them together, and there are also options to form tab groups in the overflow menu, as well as the context menu that opens when you long-press to create a new tab.
although 9to5Google notes that the features rolled out last week, but they don’t seem to be available to every Chrome user yet. However, you can enable them manually via Chrome’s experimental flags. We found that we could make them appear by navigating to chrome: // flags in the address bar and then finding and enabling the ‘Tab Grid Layout’, ‘Tab Groups’, ‘Continue Tab Groups’ and ‘Tab Groups’ UI Enhancements ” options. We found that we had to restart Chrome twice for the new interface to appear.