How to use Chrome tab groups

You open Chrome on a Monday and there are thirty tabs in one flat strip — three half-read articles, a ticket, two docs, a pricing page — and nothing tells you which belongs to what. Tab groups are Chrome's built-in fix, but the menu that creates one is easy to miss, so most people never use it. Learning how to use Chrome tab groups takes about a minute: you right-click a tab, choose Add tab to new group, then type a name and pick a color. From there you fold finished groups out of the way, drag a whole group to reorder it, and pull tabs in or out as the work changes. Every one of those actions is native Chrome, no extension required. The one thing Chrome does not do is keep the arrangement once the window closes: the names, colors, and collapsed state live only in memory, so a crash or a forced update returns a flat strip again. This tutorial covers the native mechanics first, then shows how to save the whole arrangement with Tabwell so it survives a restart.

Create your first Chrome tab group

Grouping is built into Chrome, so you do not install anything to start. Creating a group is a genuine sequence — do these in order:

Right-click any tab in the strip and choose Add tab to new group.
A small colored dot appears next to the tab. Click it to open the group editor.
Type a name in the label field — "Client", "Bug #4821", "Reading" — so you can recognize the group later.
Pick a color from Chrome's palette: blue, red, green, and the rest. The color becomes the group's visual tag along the tab strip.

That is the whole creation flow. The group now shows as a colored pill at the start of its tabs, and any tab inside it stays attached as you work.

Add and remove tabs from a group

A group is not fixed once you make it. To add a tab, drag it next to the group until it slides under the colored pill, or right-click the tab, choose Add tab to group, and pick the group by name. To pull a tab out, drag it away from the group or right-click and choose Remove from group. The group's name and color stay the same as its membership changes, so you can keep one "Active" group and rotate tabs through it all day.

Collapse, expand, and move groups

Once you have a few groups, two actions keep the window readable. Collapse a group by clicking its pill — it folds to about one tab's width, so three finished groups stop crowding the one you are working in; click the pill again to expand it. Move a whole group by dragging its pill along the tab strip, which carries every tab in the group with it, so you can order groups by priority and keep the active work where you expect it. Chrome tracks each group's title, color, and collapsed flag through the chrome.tabGroups Manifest V3 API, which is how an extension can later read or rebuild a group.

Groups stay in the window — until it closes

Here is the limit worth knowing before you rely on groups: a Chrome tab group lives only while its window is open. The name you typed, the color you picked, and the collapsed state are held in the running browser, not written to disk. Move between windows and the groups follow along, but close the window, hit an accidental Cmd+Q, or take a forced Chrome update, and Chrome reopens your tabs as a flat strip — the groups are not rebuilt. The arrangement you spent a few minutes on is gone.

Save the arrangement so a restart cannot wipe it

Tabwell closes that gap by saving the whole arrangement, not just the URLs. It walks every open window with chrome.tabs, reads each group's name, color, and collapsed flag with chrome.tabGroups, and writes the record to local IndexedDB via dexie — no account, nothing leaves your device. On restore it rebuilds every group with its original title, color, and collapsed state, so a collapsed "Archive" group comes back collapsed and a red group comes back red. Every install starts with a 14-day Pro trial; after it the Free tier keeps your latest 5 snapshots with manual save and restore and a 60-minute auto-snapshot, while Pro lifts the cap to unlimited, adds full-text search, and auto-snapshots every 5 minutes for $3.99/month, $29/year, or $19 one-time during Founders pricing. This tutorial stays on the native mechanics — for the capture-and-restore detail see the save tab groups guide, and for arranging an existing set of groups see the organize guide, both linked below.

FAQ

How do I create a tab group in Chrome?

Right-click any tab and choose Add tab to new group. A colored dot appears next to the tab; click it to type a name and pick a color from Chrome's palette. The tab is now in a group, shown as a colored pill at the start of the strip, and you can drag other tabs in to join it.

How do I add or remove a tab from a group?

To add a tab, drag it next to the group until it slides under the colored pill, or right-click it, choose Add tab to group, and pick the group by name. To remove a tab, drag it away from the group or right-click and choose Remove from group. The group's name and color stay the same while its membership changes.

Can I move a whole tab group at once instead of one tab at a time?

Yes. Drag the group's colored pill along the tab strip and every tab in the group moves with it. Dragging a single tab instead changes that tab's group membership. Ordering groups by priority keeps the active work where you expect it in the strip.

Do Chrome tab groups stay after I close the window?

No. A native Chrome tab group lives only while its window is open, so closing the window, an accidental Cmd+Q, or a forced update returns a flat strip with the groups gone. Chrome's own reopen does not rebuild them. To keep the arrangement you need to save a snapshot first, which is what Tabwell does.

Do tab groups need a recent version of Chrome?

Native tab groups — creating, naming, coloring, collapsing, and moving them — work in current Chrome with no extension. Tabwell, which saves and rebuilds the arrangement, requires Chrome 114 or later because it uses the chrome.sidePanel API introduced in that release. Edge and other Chromium browsers may work but are not officially supported, and Firefox and Safari are not.

How many saved tab-group arrangements can I keep for free?

Every install gets a 14-day Pro trial with no credit card. After that the Free tier keeps your latest 5 snapshots with manual save and restore and a 60-minute auto-snapshot, with each group's name, color, and collapsed state recorded in every snapshot. Pro removes the 5-snapshot cap and adds full-text search and 5-minute auto-snapshots for $3.99/month or $19 one-time during Founders pricing.