Chrome is killing underused Stacked Tabs feature

With the availability of Tab Groups and upcoming Scrollable tabs, Google is disabling the Stacked tabs feature in the Chrome browser. The company is planning to remove it eventually. The change can be first seen in Chrome 96 Canary.

If you wonder does Chrome support tab stacking? It used to behind exist behind a flag 8 years back (2013). Over the years, the flag has disappeared, but not the code related to it.

In case, you don’t know, the Stacked tabs feature still works in Chrome.

Chrome stacked tabs gif

How to enable Stacked Tabs in Chrome right now

Right-click on the Chrome shortcut and select Properties
In the Target filed at the end give space and add “--force-stacked-tab-strip-layout and click Apply.

Now try to open plenty of tabs, tabs never shrink, they stack on one over other when there is not enough room. Check the GIF embedded above.

Tabs Stacked Chrome

That is Stacked tabs for you in Chrome, now Google is killing it citing low usage. We can bet nobody knows it does exist and Chrome supports the feature today.

Google to disable and remove Stacked Tabs from Chrome

“We’re going to proactively remove stacked tabs. The feature seems to get minimal usage and its meaningful obstacle for continuing to develop its replacement.”

Chromium team to disable the feature first with a small CL and to follow up with other CLs to remove the code.

Here is the flag that landed as part of development.

The flag when enabled “Prevents the (Chrome) tabstrip from entering stacked tabs mode” on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS.

Unless you run Chrome with the command line switch we mentioned above, the flag may not work.

Launch Chrome
Search for “stacked Tabs”
In the dropdown for “Force disable Stacked Tabs”
Select Enabled and restart the browser.

The above flag may stop stacked tabs command line shortcut from working. Having said that, it could take some time for the changes to land in release, until then, you can rock with tab stacking on the Chrome browser.

Closing words:

Google Chrome still supports Stacked Tabs in 2021 via command line shortcut. The feature first appeared behind a flag in 2013. Google is planning to disable and remove the feature code altogether.