There have been times I’ve had 200+ tabs open in Chrome, and wading through them can be a real task.
Finding a link when I need it most among these tabs can be daunting and cost more time than I would like.
These tabs weren’t just mentally fatiguing; they also affected my phone’s performance and battery life.
Fed up with the conundrum, I decided to use an underrated feature that I had avoided for so long.
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Group Tabs in Chrome was my savior when I wanted to organize 200 open tabs
It started to get overwhelming
I have way too many tabs open in Chrome, especially when I’m shopping during events like Black Friday and holidays.
My greed and indecision about buying stuff online often lead me to leave many tabs open so I can come back to them when I want.
When I pair these tabs with work-related browsing, I easily cross 150 tabs at some point.
Earlier, I would manually close tabs that I didn’t deem important, but when it comes to closing 200 of them, it creates anxiety that isn’t necessary.
I’ve tried bookmarking them, but that felt more permanent and required even more organizing than I anticipated.
Since I didn’t want to give up these tabs, I decided to use Chrome’s tab group feature, which I’d avoided for years.
I used to turn this feature off because I prefer the classic Chrome experience. But I realized Google added this feature for a reason.
It was for people like me who like to hoard tabs and don’t know what to do with them. After I started using this feature, I started stacking tabs into folders inside the tab switcher.
I created a visual card that represented groups consisting of shopping, research pages, and casual browsing.
I tend to do a lot of random browsing, such as looking up why beavers are important to an ecosystem. Or look up the history of bagels.
Random browsing is amusing, but it’s not as fun to navigate if I hadn’t closed the tabs earlier.
If you’re wondering how I organize my tabs in groups, there are a few ways:
- In the tab switcher menu, long-press a tab and drag it over another tab to create a group instantly.
- Long-press a tab until a menu pops up, then tap Add tab to new group.
- If you’re on a page and want to save it to a group, tap the three-dot menu and select the Add tab to group option.
After I add a tab to a group, I name it and call it a day. But if you want to stay organized, you can give the group a short name and color so you can expand the group faster.
Using Group Tabs is not enough to cure my tab problem in Chrome
I used another feature to make my phone work better
While Tab Groups solved my problem of organizing over 150 tabs, they still weren’t enough to make Chrome stress-free.
But I remembered Chrome had an inactive tabs feature I could use alongside tab groups. Chrome has a setting that suspends tabs you haven’t opened in a while and moves them into a separate section.
This would remove all the remaining tabs I’d opened a long time ago and was too lazy to organize. So I turned on Chrome’s inactive tabs feature and selected the 14-day duration.
Inactive tabs can be suspended and put in a separate section in Chrome if they haven’t been open in 7/14/21 days.
To turn on the inactive tabs setting, open Settings from the three-dot menu, navigate to Advanced, and select Tabs and tab groups. In this section, select Move to inactive tabs and choose a duration.
After turning on the inactive tabs setting, you will notice an immediate improvement in your phone’s performance and battery life.
That’s because these tabs, which were previously hoarding memory in your phone’s RAM, are no longer available for other tasks.
Grouping my tabs into folders and moving inactive tabs to a separate section helped with my tab-hoarding problem.
Having 10 to 12 tab groups made it easier to find links when I needed them, and inactive tabs were no longer in my view unless I opened the website again from the inactive-tabs section.
It forced me to manage my tabs and made me more efficient at finding things than ever before. If I want to find an article relevant to my research, I can expand its group.
And when it’s time to buy a jacket, I sift through all the tabs in that group. To top it off, Chrome syncs my group tabs across all my devices, so I can pick up where I left off on my desktop or tablet.
Sync might not be perfect and occasionally hiccups, but it’s still better than dealing with 200 tabs across all devices.
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Chrome has underrated features that I should’ve used earlier
Before Chrome’s tab-group feature, the tab switcher felt daunting and confusing.
I couldn’t find the website I needed, and my phone’s battery suffered. But since I started using the feature, I’ve saved countless minutes and got rid of a habit that caused anxiety.
If you’re in the same boat as I was, try these two Chrome features and reduce your tab-hoarding habit.