Update: This is now live on Canary. Here is how it looks like:

Google is adding “Tabs” to Chrome’s App Menu in macOS. App Menu what appears on the left side of Mac’s menu bar. These display the name of the app you’re using appears in bold, followed by other menus, often with standard names such as File, Edit, Format or Window.

Here is how Chrome’s App Menu looks like now:

Google is adding one more item to this list called “Tabs”. According to a code change request that I spotted today, this new menu will include “a few things” from the existing “Window” menu followed by a list of entries corresponding to open tabs in the current window.

According to the Chromium code base, this change will:

1) Adds a new class, TabMenuBridge, which binds a TabStripModel to a
NSMenu;
2) Adds a new menu item to the main menu named “Tab”;
3) Creates a TabMenuBridge for any tabbed browser window in the
app controller.

Why This Change?

What’s the logic behind this change? There are two reasons why they are doing this:

First, to allow easier access to commands that are currently only present in the tab’scontext menu.

Second, to allow easier access to tabs in crowded tabstrips. The first purpose is well-defined and understood but the second is very much experimental.

The first one sounds useful but not very exciting. However, the second and experimental use case sounds exciting to me. I occasionally end up with a lot of tabs in a Chrome window, but not very often. However, I know a lot of Chrome users who tend to have a lot of tabs open, almost all the time. For such users, if they are using macOS, this will definitely be useful.

In the future, we might see more changes or improvements coming to this menu:

Renaming the static items to better fit their new context. This was
not done here to avoid breaking existing user key equivalents, which
identify items by their full name.

Exploring other orderings of tabs in this menu.

Adding other tab actions to this menu, like “Bookmark” or possibly
page actions.

Adding a search bar to search within tab titles/origins?

Adding key equivalents for the static actions (which will resolve
the actual accessibility bug this commit is for)

The “Exploring other orderings of tabs” sounds interesting to me. What if this can show tab groups too?

Are there any other ideas for this new “Tabs” menu that you can think of? Let me know in comments!