Google Chrome is working on a scrollable tab strip to accommodate multiple tabs

Google Chrome users have always felt the need for an expandable tab bar, but the current user interface of the tab bar gets extremely cluttered if multiple tabs are opened simultaneously. The users have been demanding Google to do something about this issue, and finally, it seems that Google has listened and paid heed to the users’ demands.

According to TD, new flag labeled as ‘Scrollable TabStrip’ has been added in Chrome 87, 88 and above Canary channel, and it is available for Windows, Chrome OS, and Linux. After this revelation from an employee on a public forum, a Chrome engineer also confirmed the presence of this new flag in Chrome Canary.

If you also want to try this Scrollable tab bar in Chrome Canary, you will first have to Launch latest Chrome Canary browser and then Search for the ‘Scrollable TabStrip’ flag in chrome://flags section or simply pasting this chrome://flags/#scrollable-tabstrip in the address bar will bring the required page.

Once you find it, click on the dropdown menu and choose ‘Enable.’

After enabling the flag, restart the browser and you are all set to try this new feature. After enabling this feature you'll be able to see a new Tabstrip icon (a parallel pair of 3 doted line) right around the new tab plus (+) icon, currently it's not looking a well crafted button, probably because Chrome team is still working on it. The icon helps in navigating the multiple tabs in the strip bar, pressing on the left side of icon (i.e. 3 dots on the left) moves the Tabstrip to the extreme left, while hiding the New Tab (+) icon, on the other hand, pressing the right side of the icon reveals the new tab icon again along with tabs in extreme right.

The concept of a scrollable tab bar is not new. Firefox has had this feature for a while. On Firefox, if you open numerous tabs, you will see left/right arrows in the tab bar which will let you scroll in the horizontal direction through different tabs.

This feature is especially very helpful for those people who have a habit of opening multiple tabs at one time. On the Chrome browser, the tab bar soon gets very cluttered, and to see the tabs clearly, users have to close some tabs that they do not want to use immediately. But to do that, first, they have to open each tab to see which one is of immediate importance and which tab can be closed for now but later opened through the ‘History’ of closed tabs.

This is quite a tedious process and honestly, a scrollable or expandable tab bar was badly needed on Chrome. Luckily, it is coming and hopefully, it will turn out to be as useful as people are expecting it to be.

However, it is not known when it will be available on the Stable channel.
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