Google seems to be experimenting with a new method to manage open tabs on Chrome. This is currently available in the Canary version of Chrome. The new method is called “Tab Strips” and it is a scrollable carousel of tabs thumbnails.

How Chrome Tab Strips Work

“Tab Strips” opens up a scrolling list of tab thumbnails above Chrome’s address bar aka Omnibox. You can click any of these thumbnails to go to those tabs. You can also close or open a new tab from the tab strip.

Google is still working on this new tab management method. For now, you can open or close new tabs from here. A recent code change also added “Most Recently Used” ordering to the tab strip.

Flags to Enable

Here are the flags that you will need to enable to test this feature:

After enabling these flags, restart Chrome to start using Tab Strips. To open the tab strip, click the up arrow next to the new tab + icon on the top-right corner of Chrome.

This will open the tab strips menu. Click on any tab thumbnail to go to that tab. You can also close any open tab using the X icon on the thumbnail. Tab Grouping does not seem to work on this UI yet.

You can also visit chrome://tab-strips to see the tab strip.

The tab strips UI takes up a lot of space on the screen. However, it can be handy for a situation where you will need to see a snapshot of all your open tabs while working on any other open tab.

There have been a lot of code change requests for this new tab management interface. The work seems to be far from complete.

Stay tuned to Chrome Story for more updates on Tab Strips.