Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
Tl; Dream
- Chrome has been playing around with the menu to open links in new tabs over the last couple of years.
- If you are used to opening tabs in groups, you may have a preference for where that selection falls on the list.
- Chrome now offers a flag that gives users full control of that order.
Everyone has their own opinions in terms of Browser tabs. Some of us are tiring, holding tabs organized and staying on top of closing unnecessary. Others simply couldn’t worry about thinking twice, and just keep opening up more and more until Chrome throws up his “:)” counter in surrender. Depending on where you fall on that spectrum, you may have some strong feelings about Tab groups – To love them for how they let us sort open websites, or hate how they put chaos to the one big list of tabs. If you have recently found yourself accidentally opening links in new fabord groups when you did not mean – or the opposite – you will be happy to know that you are not going crazy and there is a good reason for what is happening.
When you long pressed on a link in Chrome on Android, the first three options you get how the browser opens the goal: In a new tab, in a new tab grouped with the current, or in an Incognito tab. But when we poked around Google’s new Chrome beta 138 (138.0.7204.35) Android release today, we found ourselves to raise an eyebrow on the order of these options: Had Google moved them around?
Sure enough, that’s what happened, but the schedule around the change is more than a little confusing.
So close we can tell, Google Pressed the group option up to the top of the list about two years ago. Then a few months back, Google Essentially, it dropped the change, but also introduced a flag that now controls it.
The presence of that flag makes it easy for Google to experiment with this menu’s design, and that may be exactly why people feel confused about what order they are actually used to and that feels new. We just discovered such a conversation into the social forums for Brave Browser (which, like Chrome itself, is based on chromium), and identifies the setting behind all this.
If you want to change the order of options for new tapes, just navigate to chromium: // flag and search for “Tab in group.” The full name of the flag you are looking for is #Swap-new-and-no-tab-in-group-Android. Pull it up, then you can switch between the standard options (handing over to Google) or explicitly activating or disabling. With the flag activatedWe first see the new tab, while the group option gets the top track when disabled.
Now you can take full control of Chrome’s new tab menu order and hopefully avoid a lot of unnecessary frustration.