Update your Edge Chromium browser today and you’ll get a nice little prompt asking if you want to enable the browser’s new vertical tabs feature. As someone who always likes to try new things, I decided to take my browser’s suggestion.
This, of course, gave me a pretty monstrous list of tabs on the left side of my browser. (Yes I really need to clean up– this is just a small crop of the frame that fills the entire vertical space of my 1440p screen.)
You will see that all my links from Reddit are crammed together. That’s intentional: I’ve been looking for ways to make the vertical tab bar a bit more manageable-because now it feels more like an outline than a wasteland of tabs living at the top of my browser – and I’ve come across a few tricks to consider whether you are taking a test drive the new interface.
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Before I start, you should know that the default view of your sidebar doesn’t have to be permanentClick on the little one arrow in the top right corner of your tab bar to let the whole thing collapse in a series of icons. Hover over it and your tabs will expand. I confess I don’t think this is the most convenient setup for productivity, but at least it makes my browser look super clean.
As for the organizational hacks, I recommend coming in edge: // flags in the address bar of your browser and activate three different flags:
- # edge tab groups: It allows users to organize tabs into visually different groups, for example to separate tabs associated with different tasks.
- # edge-tab-groups-auto-create: Automatically creates groups for users, if tab groups are enabled.
- # edge-tab-groups-collapse: Collapses and expands a tab group, if tab groups are enabled.
These don’t do anything for the tabs you’ve already opened, but the will drop new tabs you create from the same domain into a convenient tab group that you can collapse and expand at will. While you can still clutter your tab bar, at least grouping your tabs can help you manage it a bit better.
Another approach you can take – either to replace or in addition to the “groups” feature – is to use an extension for organize your list of open tabs. I love Organizer tab, which automatically sorts all your tabs by URL. The extension automatically sorts your tabs when you press a keyboard shortcut, but I find it more helpful to have put it on automatic sorting tabs on time intervals. Out of sight out of mind.
Finally, there are two more browser flags you can use enable for nice, not because they help you keep your tabs organized. Pull up edge: // flags / again and turn on:
- # tab-hover cards: Makes a popup with tab information visible when you move the mouse pointer over a tab. This replaces tab tooltips.
- # tab-hover-card images: Shows a preview image in tab hover maps, if tab hover maps are enabled.
Now when you float your mouse over one of your tabs in your vertical bar, you will get a nice one pop-out window with the full title of the site and an example of an image:
That said, I’m still waiting for the biggest tweak of all: a way to resize the vertical tab bar so I can see a little bit more of a site’s name standard. This was possible then Microsoft tested the feature in beta versions of Edge Chromium, so hopefully it will return at some point