Zillions of open tabs have always been a nuisance in Chrome. In contrast to Firefox or Safari, the Google browser does not make the tab range scrollable – the tabs get smaller and smaller until you can only differentiate between them by a favicon, and the rightmost tabs start to disappear at some point ( I’ve been there, trust me). Google has introduced groups of guides to mitigate this problem, but the company has also long wanted a scrollable guide strip as an alternative. And in version 88 of Chrome, you can finally activate the first version of a scrollable guide bar by means of a flag.
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The flag in question is aptly named “TabStrip Scrollable” and can be accessed by searching for the term in chrome: // flags. If you want to use the buttons to scroll left and right, in addition to the touchpad or the scroll wheel, you can also enable the “TabStrip buttons with scroll” flag. After restarting the browser, the tab bar becomes scrollable as soon as you open a certain number of sites, although the width of the tabs first decreases to free up more space before they become scrollable. We can confirm this behavior on macOS and Windows, but the flag still doesn’t work correctly on Chrome OS. We were unable to test it on Linux, so your mileage may vary there.
The tab scroll flag in Chrome Canary version 90 testing the reduction behavior preferences. Source: Reddit.
The scrollable banner strip was first identified in October 2020, when the long-standing flag finally started to work on Canary version 88 on Windows and macOS. And Google continues to adjust the tab range in the latest Canary 90 release, as reported by a Redditor. The company is testing different tab widths available on a “Tab scroll” flag, testing which size is the perfect compromise between information density and readability.