Google has been working on a feature for Chrome OS behind a flag that shows a preview of tabs under tab strip when you the click down arrow, FYI, this feature is already available in Classic Edge and Vivaldi. Chromium team is now porting the same “WebUI tab strip” feature from Chrome OS to Chrome on Windows and Linux platforms, the feature is available behind a couple of flags in the latest Chrome Canary and they can be enabled.
While you can see thumbnail preview for a tab in Chrome on the desktop by hovering over with mouse with Tab hover cards and Tab hovercard images, to display previews for all tabs at once, Google has cooked a tab strip based on WebUI for Chrome OS. Now the company has ported it over to Chrome Canary, the feature is working and requires the following three flags to be enabled in Canary 81.0.3992.4 to function.
- WebUI tab strip
- WebUI tab strip demo options.
- Touch Ui Layout
The second flag when enabled, “displays a set of options to demo and test various features and behaviors of the WebUI tab strip”. The third-flag is a crucial one that will turn on touch UI layout in the browser’s top Chrome.
Video:
If you’re a Windows 10 user, you could be familiar with “tab previews” that Classic Edge displays when you click on down arrow next to the last tab. Edge allows to reorder and scroll through tab previews as well.
From the 9to5Google’s “Chrome OS tab strips demo” video embedded below, you can notice Chrome OS replicating the same, expect Chrome tab strip to work like that in the future.
The Chrome’s new tab strip raises a question, what happened to the scrollable tab bar which Google promised to address tab overflow problem? A flag has been already available for some time now. Has that been replaced with this or do we need to wait for some more time? These should be answered by Google.
