Saved tab groups no longer disappear after a browser restart or update
Google Chrome is undoubtedly one of the best web browsers out there particularly if you’re heavily invested in the Google ecosystem (like a lot of us here at Android Police). Tons of Chrome users have dozens of open tabs which can be somewhat unnerving to deal with on occasion. To rectify this, the Chromium dev team introduced saved tab groups as a way to organize them more efficiently. Subsequent updates to saved tab groups made them appear within the bookmarks bar, making them more easily accessible. However, it had one big loophole that made it less useful than it could be. Fortunately, this appears to be fixed now on Chrome Canary with the addition of a new commit merged late last week.
The trouble with saved tab groups on the bookmarks bar would be that they would disappear when you restart or update the browser, thus defeating the purpose of the saving your tabs for later.
The developers addressed this by adding a sync bridge that allows the saved tab groups to be kept within the local storage which means they can be accessed if Chrome needs to be restarted for whatever reason.
The commit was picked up by a known Redditor who tracks Chrome-related developments. They point out, however, that saved tab groups may not appear in the same order as they were originally saved during a new browsing session. Thankfully, it seems like the Chromium team is already working to fix this particular inconsistency.
For now, the feature appears on track to be a part of version 110 of the browser, though the Reddit user speculates that the Chromium team may choose to merge it with version 108 or 109, potentially making it accessible to a broader set of users. This update would certainly allow more users to benefit from saved tab groups more quickly, as tabs can finally live on throughout several browsing sessions. You can try it out for yourself by opening up chrome://flags and then enabling the #tab-groups-save flag.
Thanks: Leonardo!
