Chrome tab groups: the complete guide

Chrome tab groups let you bundle tabs together under a coloured, named label in your tab strip. You create one by right-clicking a tab and choosing Add tab to new group. From there you can name it, colour it, collapse it to save space, move it to another window and close or reopen the whole group at once. This guide covers every part, plus how to keep groups tidy without daily effort.

Create a group

1. Right-click any tab.
2. Choose Add tab to new group.
3. Type a name (short is best: "Work", "Trip", "Thesis").
4. Pick a colour.

To add more tabs, drag them onto the group, or right-click a tab and choose Add tab to group, then pick the group. To add several at once, hold Ctrl (Cmd on a Mac) and click the tabs to select them first.

Name and colour it

Click the group's label at any time to rename it or change its colour. Chrome offers nine colours: grey, blue, red, yellow, green, pink, purple, cyan and orange. Choose one meaning per colour and stick with it; colours are what make groups faster than reading. We wrote a whole post on colour-coding your tabs.

You can also leave the name empty. The group then shows only as a coloured dot, which is handy when space is tight.

Collapse and expand

Click a group's label to collapse it. Its tabs disappear from the strip and leave only the label behind. Click again to bring them back. Collapsing is the single most useful tab-group habit: keep open only the group you're working in.

Collapsed tabs are hidden, not closed, so they still use memory.

Move, reorder and ungroup

• Reorder: drag the label to move the whole group along the tab strip.
• New window: right-click the label and choose Move group to new window.
• Remove one tab: right-click it and choose Remove from group.
• Ungroup everything: right-click the label and choose Ungroup. The tabs stay open.
• Close the group: right-click the label and choose Close group.

Save a group for later

Recent versions of Chrome can keep a group after you close it, so you can reopen the same set of tabs later. Saved groups appear in the bookmarks bar area or the tab groups menu, depending on your Chrome version. It's an easy way to keep a project's tabs without having them open all day.

Where groups fall short

Tab groups are manual. Every new tab arrives outside any group, and keeping things sorted means dragging tabs all day. After a busy morning, most people's groups have given up.

That's the gap TabHue fills. You set up categories once (it starts with Work, Learning and Social), and every tab you open joins the right coloured group automatically. TabHue only manages the groups it creates, so any group you make yourself is left alone. You can also collapse every group except the one you're in with Alt+Shift+C.

More on how matching works in Categories and website rules.

Frequently asked questions

How many tab groups can I have in Chrome?

There's no practical limit. For everyday use, three to six groups is the sweet spot; beyond that, the labels themselves start to clutter the strip.

Do tab groups sync between computers?

Saved groups can sync with your Google account if Chrome sync is on, in recent Chrome versions. Open, unsaved groups belong to the window they're in.

Can Chrome put tabs into groups automatically?

Not on its own. Extensions like TabHue add that: each website is matched to a category, and the tab joins that category's group the moment it opens.