Update your Edge Chromium browser today and you’ll receive a fun message asking if you want to enable the browser’s new Vertical Tabs feature. As someone who always likes to try new things, I decided to follow my browser’s suggestion.
This, of course, gave me a rather monstrous list of guides on the left side of my browser. (Yes, me I really need to organize– this is just a small cut from the list that fills the entire vertical space of my 1440p monitor.)
You will notice that all of my Reddit links have been mixed together. This is intentional: I’ve been looking for ways to make the vertical guide bar a little more manageable –since it now looks more like a contour than a desert of guides who live on top of my browser – and I’ve discovered some tricks forconsider it if you are taking a test drive the new interface.
G / O Media can receive a commission
Before you begin, know that the standard appearance of your sidebar doesn’t have to be permanent. Click on the small “<" arrow in the upper right corner of the guide bar to collapse the whole thing in a series of icons. Hover your mouse over them to expand their tabs. I confess that I don’t think this setting is the most useful for productivity, but at least it makes my browser super clean.
As for organizational hacks, I recommend inserting edge: // flags in your browser’s address bar and enabling three different flags:
- # edge-tab-groups: It allows users to organize guides into visually distinct groups, for example, separate guides associated with different tasks.
- # edge-tab-groups-auto-create: Automatically creates groups for users, if tab groups are enabled.
- # edge-tab-groups-collapse: Allows a group of guides to be collapsible and expandable, if groups of guides are enabled.
They won’t do anything for the tabs you’ve already opened, but will drop the new tabs created in the same domain into an accessible tab group that you can collect and expand at will. Although you can still mess up your tab bar, at least grouping your tabs will help you manage it a little better.
Another approach you can take – replacing or in addition to the “groups” feature – is to use an extension to organize your list of open tabs. I like Guide organizer, which automatically sorts all of your tabs by URL. The extension will automatically sort your tabs whenever you press a keyboard shortcut, but I think it’s more useful for set it up for automatic sorting guides by time intervals. Out of sight, out of mind.
Finally, there are two more browser flags that you can enable for fun, not because they will help you keep your guides organized. Pull up border: // flags / one more time and call:
- # tab-hover-cards: Activates a pop-up containing tab information to be visible when hovering over a tab. This will replace the tooltips in the tabs.
- # tab-hover-card-images: Shows a preview image on the guide help cards, if the guide help cards are enabled.
Now when you hover hover over any of the vertical bar tabs, you’ll get a lovely pop-out window that provides the full title of the website and a preview of the image:
That said, I’m still waiting for the biggest adjustment of all – a way to resize the vertical tab bar so that I can see a little more of a website’s name by default. It is it was possible when Microsoft was testing the feature in beta versions of Edge Chromium, so I hope it will return at some point.