Chrome is finally getting vertical tabs

What’s coming

After years of resisting, Chrome is finally adding vertical tabs. It has been reported that Google announced on Tuesday users will be able to move tabs to the side of the browser window, making full page titles easier to read and tab groups simpler to manage. Power users — researchers, tab hoarders, anyone who lives in 30-plus tabs — are the obvious winners. Finally. Better late than never, right?

How it works

You can allegedly turn the feature on by right‑clicking a Chrome window and selecting “Show Tabs Vertically.” Once enabled, vertical tabs will remain the default until you switch back. Google says there’s no hard limit on how many tabs you can open beyond your hardware limits, and vertical tabs behave like horizontal ones: separate windows can still keep their own tab sets and groups. This isn’t entirely new — Chrome tested side tabs years ago — but the option has matured from a flag trick into a user-facing feature.

Why it matters

The move is another sign of Chrome responding to competition from modern browsers — think Arc (and its AI successor Dia) — which have leaned heavily into interface experiments as a way to steal mindshare. It has been reported that Chrome is also rolling out a refreshed Reading Mode and has recently added Gemini AI hooks, Split View, and faster releases. There’s an irony here: the feature aims to tame clutter on pages that are cluttered because publishers chased ad dollars — yet Google’s own AI pivot is changing how traffic flows to those publishers. Small change, big signal: Chrome is willing to copy what works, and that will make it harder for rivals to keep unique selling points for long.

Sources: techcrunch