How to group tabs in Chrome

Tab groups are Chrome’s built-in answer to a tab strip that has turned into a row of identical favicons. A group is a colored label with tabs tucked under it; you can name it, collapse it to a single chip, drag it around as a unit, and close it knowing Chrome keeps it for later. Here’s how to use them, the parts that are easy to miss, and where they stop.

Create a group

Right-click any tab and choose Add tab to group, then New group. In a window with no groups yet, Chrome shows this as one item, Add tab to new group. A small bubble appears: type a name, pick one of the colors, press Enter. The name is optional; an unnamed group is just a colored dot, which is fine for “these three belong together” and useless a week later.

To add more tabs, either drag them onto the group, or right-click them and choose Add tab to group, which lists your existing groups by name. Dragging a tab out of the group removes it, and so does Remove from group in the tab’s right-click menu. Groups are contiguous, so Chrome keeps member tabs together and slides other tabs out of the way.

There’s no keyboard shortcut for creating a group, and none you can assign; this is one of the few tab actions that still needs the mouse.

Collapse and expand

Click the group’s label and the tabs fold into it, leaving only the chip. Click again to expand. Collapsed groups are the main reason to bother: a window with forty tabs across five collapsed groups reads like five tabs.

One detail worth knowing: collapsing hides tabs but doesn’t stop them. A collapsed group of video tabs uses the same memory it did open, which is a job for Memory Saver or putting tabs to sleep rather than for groups. Our tab suspender sleeps a whole window in one move.

The group menu

Right-click the label for everything else:

• New tab in group opens a blank tab inside the group. A plain Ctrl+T opens at the end of the strip, outside any group.
• Ungroup dissolves the group and leaves its tabs open. Chrome asks you to confirm, since the group is also removed from your other devices.
• Close group closes its tabs and keeps the group, covered next.
• Move group to new window pulls the whole group out into its own window.
• Delete group removes the group for good, here and on your other devices signed in to the same Google Account. Chrome asks you to confirm.

Save a tab group in Chrome

Chrome saves tab groups on its own. Its help page says a closed group “isn’t deleted and is saved in the bookmarks bar or in the menu”. So you close a group with Close group, and it waits in two places.

• On the bookmarks bar, where you click the group to bring it back with its tabs.
• In the Chrome menu, under Tab groups.

If your groups are missing from the bookmarks bar, open Settings, go to Appearance, and turn on Show tab groups in bookmarks bar. The setting next to it, Automatically pin new tab groups to the bookmarks bar, also pins groups you make on your other devices.

Groups sync too. When history and tabs are synced with your Google Account, changes to a group are saved and appear on your other devices, so a group you built on the desktop is on the laptop.

What removes a group is Delete group or Ungroup, and both ask first. Chrome’s “Continue where you left off” startup setting restores open groups after a normal restart, and Ctrl+Shift+T reopens a just-closed group as a unit. A group holds only its current tabs, so for the rest of a lost window see how to restore tabs in Chrome.

On a phone

Chrome on Android and iOS has tab groups too: in the tab grid, drag one tab onto another to combine them, and tap the group to open it. Groups from the desktop show up there with sync on. Naming and coloring work the same way; collapsing is a desktop-only idea, since the grid already hides tabs.

Where groups stop

Groups organize a set of tabs and keep it for later. Three things sit outside what they cover.

1. A group lives in one window. If your project is two windows, a group can’t span them, and there’s no way to save a multi-window layout as a group.
2. Only grouped tabs are kept. Chrome saves the group and leaves out the loose tabs around it. Nothing in Chrome writes a copy of your whole window on a schedule.
3. There’s no history. A group is its current tab list. The tab you removed from it on Tuesday is not in it anymore.

That gap is what session managers are for, and it’s what the session side of our extension, UtilEngine, does. Press your shortcut (Alt+Z by default), type “save”, and the current window becomes a named session: every tab in order, pinned state included, restorable on any machine you’re signed into. Separately, it snapshots all your open windows every hour (you can change the interval) and keeps 14 days of them, so the window you never saved is recoverable too. When you only remember a tab, the Session Manager searches every tab across all your sessions and snapshots. For a tab that is still open, the tab switcher finds it by name across every window.

Two caveats. UtilEngine is paid ($49 once, no subscription), and sessions record windows and tabs, not group membership: restore a session and you get the tabs back in order, but you’ll regroup them yourself. Groups are still the best way to lay out a window; sessions are how you get the window back. Compared side by side with the other ways to save tabs in how to save tabs in Chrome.

Tab groups elsewhere

• Edge and Brave: the same feature with the same menu, since both build on Chromium. Edge also has Collections, which are closer to a reading list than to groups.
• Firefox: added tab groups in 2025, with naming and colors, and drag-to-combine in the tab strip.
• Safari: has had Tab Groups since 2021, in the sidebar rather than the tab strip, and they sync through iCloud.

Common questions

How do I group tabs in Chrome?

Right-click a tab, choose Add tab to group, then New group, and give it a name and a color. Drag other tabs onto the group, or right-click them and choose Add tab to group.

Is there a keyboard shortcut for creating a tab group?

No. Creating a group needs the right-click menu or drag and drop. Once a group exists, Ctrl+Tab and the other tab switching shortcuts work across it.

Do tab groups save when I close Chrome?

Yes. Chrome saves tab groups on its own. A group you close stays on the bookmarks bar and in the Chrome menu under Tab groups, and open groups come back if the startup setting is Continue where you left off. With history and tabs synced, your groups also appear on your other devices.

How do I reopen a tab group I closed?

Ctrl+Shift+T (Cmd+Shift+T on a Mac) reopens the most recently closed item, and a closed group counts as one item. It’s also listed under Recently closed in the history menu. Later on, click the group on the bookmarks bar, or open the Chrome menu and choose Tab groups.

Can a tab group contain tabs from two windows?

No. A group belongs to one window. Use Move group to new window to relocate it whole, or a session manager to save a layout that spans several windows.