Google's latest tab grouping feature means you can hit pause on your holiday research and keep your browser clean and distraction-free. — Catherine Waibel/dpa
"Open in new tab." Few browser functions are more important when it comes to getting research done online.
To prevent things from getting cluttered with dozens of open websites, Google is now maximising the power of the tab with a new organisational approach to Chrome.
The popular browser already allowed us to group tabs together, but Google now wants you to tidily collapse away entire groups of tabs into a neat folder.
This means you can hit pause on your holiday research and keep your browser clean and distraction-free without having to go all Marie Kondo on old tabs that may or may not spark joy.
Tap on your tab group called "news" or "work", and the collection instantly pops out so you can jump straight back in. If you often find yourself with more than 10 tabs open at a time, it's a decluttering feature that should make online research just that bit simpler.
It's coming as part of the new version 85 of Chrome, but it isn't the browser's only new function.
Google has also improved how it handles PDF files. Until now, you could basically only view a PDF document in your browser. Now you can also fill in forms and even save changes to a PDF.
Meanwhile in a beta version of an even newer Chrome version, there's also a new tab preview function. This means when you mouse-over a tab, a small preview image opens showing you what's going on in that tab. This feature may yet prove to be all-too radical to make it into version 86 of the browser, however.
If you aren't able to see the new features, you'll have to be patient. Google says the stability of the browser has priority and that new features are not immediately distributed to everyone using Chrome. – dpa
