14 DAY TRIAL // With a market share of nearly 70 percent on the desktop, it’s pretty clear Google Chrome has millions of users testing the browser’s limits in various ways, including when it comes to handling a bigger number of tabs in the same active session.
And honestly, working with many tabs at the same time is something most of us do, and Google apparently knows this very well.
This is why the search giant has started the work on a new improvement for Google Chrome that would change how tabs are displayed in the browser.
More specifically, Leopeva64-2 discovered that Google is experimenting with different widths of tabs, allowing users to choose how they want them to be displayed in the browser.
New feature currently in Canary build
There are four different options available right now as part of an experimental flag:
- Shrink tabs to pinned tab width
- Shrink tabs to medium width
- Shrink tabs to large width
- Don’t shrink tabs
Clearly, the purpose here is to make Google Chrome better adapt to the needs of every user out there, all in a way that makes sense based on how many tabs they run in the browser at the same time.
For example, the option that doesn’t shrink tabs makes more sense for people who don’t use multiple tabs at the same time, while the pinned tab width is a setting that mostly displays only the favicon or the first few letters from the name of a page and is more appropriate for those with tons of tabs in the browser.
At this point, it’s not exactly clear if and when Google plans to bring this feature to Chrome browser, but given it’s in the Canary stage, the search giant first wants to collect feedback on the whole thing before bringing the feature to everybody.