This change of course is motivated by the fact that Chrome does not do it as it should. It goes from everything to nothing in a single moment. From not being able to order the tabs for years, to imposing a totally different menu, without the possibility of choosing between one or the other. At least, it can’t be done by default, although we have the formula to change it.
What are these grouped tabs for?
Beyond explaining the theoretical part of the operation with these grouped tabs, we are going to present a practical case. Let’s imagine that we open several tabs of the same webEither from Amazon or various Android Help. If we have tabs of other pages open, all of these will be placed chronologically, creating a certain mess.
With this feature, they are grouped in a more orderly way, which helps to have a clearer view of the tabs. However, the menu layout changes a lot, not becoming as familiar as the one we have used for so many years in Chrome, so it may not be everyone’s taste. The fact that distribute by grids and that they are not ordered chronologically can take a toll on the browser experience.
How to group tabs in Chrome
It is one thing for the function to be implemented automatically, and another thing is to group the tabs. That is already freely configurable by the user, who decides how to classify the tabs that are open, if it is based on the web or with another criterion. To perform this grouping of tabs in a few simple steps, the method to follow is quite simple:
- Open Google Chrome
- Go to the tab button (marked with a number).
- In the tab view, click on the menu button (three dots)
- Click on ‘Group tabs’
- Select the tabs you want to group
- Hit ‘group’
Ready. Once we have done this process, we will have a group with the tabs inside.
And how do you disable grouped tabs?
Let’s go to the opposite case and the main reason for this article. It is true that there is a way to activate the grouped tabs of Google Chrome, but it is a function that usually imposes automatically after the update. So it doesn’t offer the option to disable it by default so we have to use the Chrome flags, once again, to disable grouped tabs:
- Open a new tab in Google Chrome.
- In the URL search box, type «chrome: // flags«.
- The menu appears with all the experimental options, although we have the search bar at the top to write the command that takes us directly to the option we want.
- We must enter the following command: # enable-tab-grid-layout. Basically it is deactivating the tab grids, going back to the original design that Chrome had before. Furthermore, we recommend doing this only as if you are not too familiar with the experimental functions of the browser, it is best not to touch anything else.
- Once the option is located, click on it to bring up a context menu, with several options included. Then, from all of them we choose »Disabled», how could it be otherwise.
- Well, grouped tabs would already be disabled. Next, like every time an experimental change is made in Chrome, the browser must be restarted to apply the modification. To do this, click on the button »Relaunch» at the bottom of the screen. Google Chrome restarts and the change is already applied.
It may happen, as in our test, that the change is not applied. Don’t worry, just repeat the procedure a second time for the change to be fully applied. It is quite a rough modification, so it can happen perfectly. The second time, it should already work correctly, yes or yes.