Based on a comment from Chrome employee Peter Kasting on Reddit, we’ve reported Google Chrome will get a scrollable tab bar to address the tab UI overflow problem, guess what! A new flag “Scrollable tabstrip” landed in Chrome Canary and is available for Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS. The flag is now working on Chrome 87 Canary.
If you open too many tabs in Chrome,
- The tab bar gets cluttered and you can’t notice a singe tab.
- Chrome won’t display the tab title or site favicon
- The new tab button disappears. Makes users to either to open a new window or close some tabs in the current window
The situation is different when you have the same number of tabs open in Firefox. The browser hides the extraneous tabs behind left/right arrows and lets you scroll them horizontally with the mouse wheel.
Google announced they’ll make the tabs scrollable by offering a scrollable tab strip and the developer said this then,: “scrollable tabstrip is in the works”.
UPDATE October 06, 2020: The much-awaited feature behind a flag in Chrome Canary is now working when the flag is enabled.
A few hours back Google made a commit to enable tab scrolling in Windows/Linux.
Enable Scrollable Tabstrip in Chrome
- Launch Chrome
- Search for “Scrollable TabStrip” flag
- Click on the dropdown arrow and select “Enabled”
- Restart the browser
Intentionally open a countless number of tabs, so that tabs that don’t fit on the tab bar can now be seen when you scroll with the mouse wheel on the left or right side.
After Firefox, chrome has got a scrollable tab bar. But it doesn’t look pretty, to be honest.
If the Chromium team further improves this feature and makes scrolling behavior closer to that in Firefox, then it will be liked and used by users.
You can now scroll and see overflown tabs in Chrome with your mouse wheel? What do you say on this feature addition to Chrome? Let us know in the comments below.