Jogging tons of open tabs has always been a hassle in Chrome. Unlike Firefox or Safari, the Google browser doesn’t make the tabs scrollable – tabs keep getting smaller until you can only tell them apart with a favicon, and the rightmost tabs will even disappear at some point (I’ve been there ) , believe me). Google introduced tab groups to mitigate that problem, but the company has also long wanted to introduce a scrollable tab strip as an alternative. And in Chrome version 88, you can finally enable the first version of a scrollable tab bar via a flag.
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The flag in question is appropriately named “Scrollable TabStrip” and can be accessed by searching for the term below chrome: // flagsIf you want to be able to use buttons next to your touchpad or scroll wheel to scroll left and right, you can also enable the “Scrollable TabStrip Buttons” flag. After you restart your browser, the tab bar becomes scrollable once you open a certain number of websites, although the tabs shrink in width first to make room for more before becoming scrollable. We can confirm this behavior on macOS and Windows, but the flag is not working properly on Chrome OS yet. We haven’t been able to test it on Linux, so your mileage may vary there.
The Scrolling Flag tab in Chrome Canary version 90 tests shrinkage preferences. Source: Reddit.
The scrollable tab strip was first seen in October 2020, when the long-standing flag finally started working in Canary version 88 on Windows and macOS. And Google continues to tweak the tab strip in the latest Canary 90 release, as reported by a Redditor. The company is experimenting with different tab widths available under a “Tab Scrolling” flag to test which size is the perfect compromise between information density and legibility.