I’m addicted to tabs, but what keeps my Chrome version of Android tidy and clean is the fact that switching between different websites I’ve opened is an annoying and ugly affair. Instead of a lovely looking tab, you need to click in an ugly box which then discards all your open pages as a staggered pile of solo letters.
Assuming you don’t just swipe left and right in your address bar to switch between your tabs, there’s potentially An even better user interface for ranking your open websites. In the latest beta version of Chrome for Android, Google is testing a new feature that allows you to use icons to navigate your many open websites through the bottom of the app’s user interface. It is a better looking implementation that you can get in both Chrome Beta and Chrome Stable versions. (Chrome Stable requires a small additional solution that we’ll discuss at the end of this article.)
To get started with the easiest method, download Chrome Beta and navigate to this URL through your address bar: chrome://flags/#enable-conditional-tabstrip
Enable that flag, restart Chrome and you should see the new tab strip at the bottom of your browser. If not, I didn’t, keep using the browser like you normally would. Android Police advises that it could take some time for that strip to appear, if it does.
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If not, you can also force the problem using a slightly more complex method. Go back to your Chrome Flags and find / enable the following:
- Tab groups
- Tab group UI improvements
- Conditional tab strip
Open a new tab, then open a second tab and tap the box with the “2” in the upper right corner of your browser. Drag a tab over the top of the other tab so that it merges into a group tab (instead of replacing the tab order), it will look like this:
Now when you open and close websites within this tab group, you will see the above mentioned new navigation at the bottom of your browser. It’s a crude solution at the moment, but it works! And this is also the solution to enable the tab strip in Chrome stable channel—The normal application you are using on your Android, no beta needed. Be sure to turn on the Tab groups, Tab group UI improvements and Tab Grid Layout flags, or it won’t work.
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