Watch How Google's Next Chrome Update Will Make Organizing Tabs A Whole Lot Easier

Modern browsers like Chrome make it a snap to open links in new tabs, and that's led to many a cluttered window. The next version of Chrome might ease the burden with automatic tab organization. Simply tell your browser to organize your tabs, and like magic, it'll (hopefully) create order from chaos.

Most Chrome users are on the stable channel, but the early-access Canary build offers a peek at what Google has planned for future updates. In the latest Canary version, the organize tabs feature appears next to the full tab list we already have. The demo on X (formerly Twitter) below shows the organizing process. It's a bit slow, but the result is suggested tab groups. Click a button, and your tabs will be grouped—at least theoretically. The feature is clearly still a work in progress.

A group of tabs in Chrome (and other Chromium browsers) are highlighted to make their association nice and glanceable. You can drag individual tabs into or out of groups. There's also a handle for dragging the entire group around, and a click collapses the group. If you find yourself with a mountain of unorganized tabs every day, groups could be the solution. This feature was added in 2020, but it's fully manual right now. 
Tab organization could be a killer feature for Chrome if it's implemented well. This actually seems like a situation where Google's newfound obsession with AI could come in handy. If an AI can understand the content of the page, it's more likely to organize it correctly. The rudimentary feature in Canary offers an option to edit and rename tab groups prior to implementing, so the organization doesn't need to be perfect.

The Canary build is a standalone version of Chrome that gets features even earlier than the Dev channel. Usually, new features are trialed in Canary before moving into Dev and Beta. There's no guarantee a new capability will make it all the way through testing to be deployed in the stable build. When it does, it's usually a multi-month process. So, the best-case is that tab organization works its way through testing over the remainder of 2023. In the meantime, you'll have to manually tidy your tab list. Barbaric, right?