Google Chrome is ranked high on the list of thebest web browsers for Android, and is the world’s most popular browser by sheer number of users. That’s largely due to the ease and familiarity Chrome offers on every platform — switching from your desktop to an Android tablet doesn’t feel like you’re in alien territory. However, we still miss support for a few critical elements such as extensions and fully-featured tab grouping on mobile. Google is inching ahead, though, and a new flag suggests tab group sharing will soon be simpler.
Sharing tabsmay not seem like a necessary feature because most of us only ever share individual links to products, articles, web pages, etc., but tab sharing allows the recipient to resume browsing right where you left off, making it a critical component of resuming work on other devices connected to your Google account, or simply sharing hours of browsing with other people.
Tab groups come in handy when organizing browser clutter topically, and are easy to set up on Android — you just open the tab switcher UI and drag and drop tabs atop each-other to create a group. Then, adding more tabs to it is much like adding apps to a folder on your home screen. However, sharing this tab group entails selecting all the grouped tabs in the tab switcher, and then hitting the Share button in the three-dot overflow menu. This converts an organized tab group into a list of web URLs for the recipient.
Popular Chrome feature researcher@Leopeva64 on X(formerly Twitter) recently spotted a couple of new flags in Chrome Canary for Android, suggesting tab groups will soon achieve feature parity with the browser’s desktop version. The flag descriptions suggest Google will allow color assignment to tab groups and visual indicators such as outlines for selected tabs in the tab strip. Leopeva64 also says sharing tab groups on your Android device will be greatly simplified once feature parity goes live. Presumably, Google will allow convenient sharing via QR code or other means such that the chosen tabs open right away on the recipient’s device.
chrome://flags/#tab-group-parity-android
chrome://flags/#tab-strip-group-indicators-android
Unfortunately, enabling the flags in the current Canary build is futile because they don’t work. That leaves a lot of implementation-related questions unanswered, but Google is regular with Chrome updates, so it’s only a matter of time before we get to try the system firsthand. We would particularly appreciate Google if these changes made it easier to sync tab groups across to linked devices — machines running Chrome where you’re signed in with the same Google account.
