Chrome is making your habit of opening dozens and dozens of tabs a little easier to manage. Chromium developers are supposed to be experimenting with different tab widths when the tab scrolling feature (also under test) is enabled.
The Google test has two parts. In Chrome 88, users can enable tab scrolling using a flag. This feature makes the tab bar not look as compressed when you have multiple tabs open at the same time. Firefox and Safari have similar features, so it’s nice to see Chrome following suit.
Rolling guides with reduced guides to a wide width. Image: Reddit user Leopeva64-2
The guide scrolling feature can be activated via chrome: // flags. In addition to scrolling the guide bar with a scroll wheel or trackpad, you can also activate the left and right buttons to scroll through the open guides. It is just a matter of using what works best for you.
In addition to the scrollable guides, Google is also testing different widths on the Chrome Canary 90. With guide scrolling enabled, there are options to reduce the guides to fixed guide width, medium width, large width or no reduction. When tabs are shortened, it is virtually impossible to distinguish them apart from small website icons, so having different options is very useful.
At this point, it is not clear which option Google will use, but it is good to see the new features being tested. Personally, I think the wide-width option strikes the best balance between information density and readability. When you are able to scroll through the open tabs, you don’t really need them to shrink for any reason. Who knows, maybe Google will provide users with several options when the feature is available in a stable build.
Google has already introduced groups of guides and search for guides, but these options are still not the best solution for people who regularly have more than 50 guides open at the same time. These new features of the guide are currently being tested, so there is no way to say when they will be available, but I hope they will be released soon, because they can provide a huge boost to productivity.