How Organizing Google Chrome Tabs Makes For A Great User Experience
If you are reading this article on your desktop or laptop, how many browser tabs do you have open right now? 10, 20, 30, 50? On average, I have about 10–20 browser tabs open at one time. This article will specifically focus on Google Chrome but I think this is evident with other internet browsers as well. Why do we have so many Google Chrome tabs open when we are online? Does it make us feel more productive? Will we actually view all of those tabs? I started to think about this a few weeks ago when I had about 25 tabs open and I got frustrated trying to remember the tabs I had open since they were squished at the top of my browser screen. Not only does this phenomenon use a lot of RAM, I am also less productive because I am trying to remember so much information on the various tabs. One way to solve this pain point: organize my tabs into groups!
Google Chrome allows you to group your open tabs. I remember reading about this feature back in May 2020 and this quote from Edward Jung stood out to me: There are two types of people in the world: tab minimalists who have just a few tabs open at a time and tab collectors who have…significantly more. For minimalists and collectors alike, we’re bringing a new way to organize your tabs to Chrome: tab groups. I started to group my tabs a few weeks ago and it has made my browser experience so much better. I am able to name the tab group which makes it easier to keep related pages together. I can color code the tab group to add some design and customization to the group. In addition, I can collapse the group tab to have less space and reorder the groups in whichever way is suitable for my experience.
As you can see in the image above, I had a few tabs open that were Medium articles and I could group them under the name “Medium” and add the color green as the group’s color. Since using this feature, my browser experience has been much better and I don’t feel overwhelmed by seeing so many tabs open in my browser. Having the option to organize my tabs allows me to have a better user experience and less pressure trying to remember which tab is which.
With that being said, I do have a few suggestions on how to improve this feature; as a Product Manager, I am always thinking about ways that a product can be enhanced. First, I think there could be some ML/AI capabilities where your tabs could be automatically grouped based on the article name or website. This could be similar to how iOS groups your apps on the iPhone (iOS 14). The tradeoff here is that the groupings may not be the most accurate. Secondly, I would add more functionality to the reordering of group tabs. Currently, when you collapse a group and try to reorder it all the tabs appear ungrouped. I would allow users to keep their group tab collapsed even after the group tab has been reordered.
Lastly, thank you to everyone who has been reading my #MondaysWithMichael articles. I appreciate all the support and feedback. What are your thoughts after reading this article? Are you thinking about grouping your browser tabs now? Please leave a comment
