Microsoft Edge’s latest Chrome-inspired feature could tame tab chaos

Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome have been borrowing ideas from each other for years, and Microsoft appears to have found another Chrome feature worth using. A new “Tab Groups” button is starting to appear in Edge Canary for people who use vertical tabs, a Windows report has discovered. Instead of searching for a specific group through your open tabs, the new button provides a single place to view the groups you’ve already created or create a new one.

This isn’t a completely new feature for Edge. The Microsoft browser has supported tab groups for some time now, including when using vertical tabs. What’s changing is how easy it is to reach these groups. This may sound like a small interface tweak, but anyone who regularly has dozens of tabs open can probably see why this could be useful.

Edge brings groups of tabs together in one place

If vertical tabs are enabled, a new Tab Groups button is at the top of the Edge sidebar. Clicking on it displays existing groups, making it much easier to navigate between different collections of tabs without scrolling through the entire sidebar. You can also create a new group in the same location. The idea will be especially useful if you use groups to separate different parts of your browsing experience. You might have one for work, another for research, and a third containing all those articles you’re sure to read later.

One thing about Microsoft’s approach seems particularly familiar: Chrome already does something similar. Google has its own Tab Groups button in its vertically tabbed interface, providing a centralized view of saved groups and allowing users to create new ones. The Edge version follows the same logic, even down to making the feature easier to access from the vertical sidebar. For those switching between two browsers, at least there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve.

Don’t look for it in Edge just yet.

There’s one catch. Microsoft is currently testing changes to Edge Canary, so most people using the regular version of Edge won’t see the new button just yet. Canary is where Microsoft experiments with features before deciding if they’re ready for wider release. Things can change significantly during this process, and some experiments never make it to the stable version of the browser.

If you’re already using Canary and want to test it out, you’ll need to enable vertical tabs. Edge allows you to enable them from the tab bar menu or through the browser settings. So Microsoft isn’t reinventing tab groups here. This simply makes it easier to access an existing feature, even if the solution is very similar to the one that came out in Chrome first.