You will soon be able to restore Chrome tab groups via browser history and bookmarks
We’ve long believed that Google’s approach to allowing users to store groups of tabs for later would be to add them to the new reading list feature. However, a new Chrome Canary flag discovered by Leopeva64 on Reddit shows that the company is instead looking to clear your recent tab groups in Chrome history. Oddly, this makes a lot more sense, and I hadn’t even thought this approach would make sense.
Display submenus of the application menu history
Show submenus in the application menu history for the contents of recently closed tab groups and windows. – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS.
# tab-restore-sub-menus
As you can see, in addition to recently closed tabs, tab groups now have their own section in the History menu of the browser, and within these, the tabs of these groups appear in submenus. From there, they can be restored individually or all at once. The only thing we still need to see since I haven’t received this update for myself so far is whether clicking “Restore All Tabs” will restore the tab group container with them. If so, Google has finally started testing the syncing of tab groups across devices, and I couldn’t be happier!
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Additionally, a Chromium Repository commit also discovered by Leopeva64 shows that Google is looking to allow users to collapse tab groups in the bookmarks menu in a more organized and meaningful way. When the user right clicks on a tab while at least one tab group exists and selects “Mark all tabs”, they will be closed and stored as bookmarks with nested folder names instead of ‘a simple list of unorganized items. You can see more info about it via the commit below.
Add folders for tab groups on Mark all tabs
When the user has opened one or more tab groups and selects “Mark all tabs”, instead of getting a folder with a flat list of tabs, he will now see nested folders for all tab groups , with a name aligned with the title of the tab group. The order of URLs and nested folders will match the order of the tabs. If multiple groups of tabs share the same title, their tabs will be combined into a single folder at the index of the first group.
Bug: 1181583
Overall, it looks like the Chrome content storage experience will be complete if these two features become mainstream. To be fair, the ability to use my tab groups on all devices is my oldest request. Since groups became a thing, I can’t wait to get rid of tab manager extensions and do everything natively. While development metrics don’t guarantee features will roll out to Chrome and Chrome OS Stable, I feel like both of these approaches to content storage are well thought out and worth pursuing to their conclusion.
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