Chrome Tab Groups and URL Sharing

Google has updated how tab grouping works in the desktop version Chrome. The “Send to self” URL sharing feature also has seen some changes. This post is to share the latest updates.

Tab Groups

Tab groups now have colors. It helps you identify tabs from a group, especially if you have more than one group.

I’m not a fan of the colors they have by default and there is no way to change colors for now.

Chrome now opens URLs from the same website in groups by default. For example, if I go to Facebook.com and then open two links in two individual tabs, Chrome will automatically group all three.

I would prefer this feature disabled by default. What do you think?

The next problem I have is the way a tab is assigned for the group name. I had explained this in a previous post. However, I am saying this again because it is still annoying me.

When a new group is created, Chrome assigns a tab for the group name. It is not really an empty tab, just tab name placed between all the other real tabs.

Finally, tab group feature is far from being stable and I think it will take at least a few months before we see this in the Stable channel.

Send to Self

Chrome is testing a new way to share URLs among your own devices. I can send URLs from my Chromebook to my phone or Mac. There are a couple of things that the team added recently.

History for shared URLs

There is a flag to enable “send to self tab history”.

Send tab to self history
It allows users to view tabs that were sent to other synced devices by accessing these tabs through a landing page either in history or in recent tabs. Requires to Send tab to self to also be enabled – Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome OS, Android

The plan is to give you a way to find all the URLs that you shared among your devices. I don’t see this working in the Canary version yet. It will be a good place to refer to in the future when we actually start using this feature regularly.

Select target devices

When this feature was initially launched, the only way you could share URL was to send it to all your devices. This has changed. You can now pick the device that you want to send the URL to.

Added to address bar

Send to self icon is now available in Chrome’s address bar aka Omnibox. When you have a URL in the Omnibox simply click anywhere inside the Omnibox and you will see this icon right next to the bookmark icon (star).