Since Google announced its Tab Groups feature, I’ve been using them for just about everything. After adding flags for collapse and freezing of the guide group, they are becoming a powerful tool for productivity. When I move to the Windows desktop for some editing or game development work, I feel a little sad because these groups of guides were not saved after I restarted my machine, but today we are going to fix that. Here’s a quick tip to tell the Chrome browser to preserve its tab groups in sessions, even after the device reboots!
Now, before we start, I wanted to give a big shout out to Dena Dellere on Twitter who gave this suggestion to his fellow educators. Without her tweet, I had completely forgotten about it! Make sure she follows some great Google Workspace for Education tips and tricks.
Okay, so this trick works on all operating systems and is very easy to do too! Just click on the three “more” menu points in the upper right corner of the Chrome browser, go to Settings, Search Engine and, under ‘On startup’, change the check box from ‘Open a new tab’ to ‘Continue from where’ you left out ‘. That’s it! Simple, I know, but without changing it, you can lose tons and tons of guides. Just be sure to do this for each profile on your Chromebook or each account that uses Chrome Sync in the browser on your Windows, Mac or Linux machine.
In fact, I was doing research for my game, my son’s birthday party, Chrome Unboxed and more, when I had a power outage due to the weather in my area and ended up losing all my groups of guides. I had previously stated that if the feature worked like Toby, allowing you to store groups of guides on the new guide page to remind you later would solve the problem, but it works just as well!
As an aside, let us know in the comments section if you have been using Guide Groups for something specific. Do you prefer to turn everything you use into icons or prefer to keep everything in the main Chrome window?
