Google Chrome has done a lot in recent months to shed its reputation for being a merciless system resource hogger. If you leave a tab unused for long enough, Google uses the new Memory Saver feature to put it to sleep and optimize resource usage. However, knowing which tabs are snoozed can be quite difficult at a glance. Thankfully, Chrome’s massive interface redesign coming to desktops sometime this year could have the ideal solution in the form of visual indicators.
We expect Google Chrome to get a UI design revamp sometime this year, and a bunch of changes are already showing up in Chrome Canary. Reputable Chrome feature researcher Leopeva64 on Twitter reports that Chrome desktop now changes the color of snoozed tabs when you hover your cursor over them.
New hover behavior for inactive Chrome tabs
We considered the possibility that Google is auto-theming this hover color based on the site’s icon, taking into account that it matches Twitter’s color scheme in this demo. But Leopeva64 says it will likely be blue for all inactive tabs, as this aligns with the coloring for other Chrome elements such as the Omnibox outline and the Power Bookmarks menu.
The researcher points out that the shape of the tab above your address bar also changes when you hover your cursor on it. Noticeably, the lower-right corner of the tab just underneath the X button switches to a rounded corner. Visually, this change may not seem significant, but it helps the illusion that all your tabs are stacked atop each other.
Until recently, Google didn’t offer official support for tab snoozing, and Chrome users were left dependent on third-party add-ons to make the browser usable on low-end computers. Even now, the Memory Saver feature only shows a small icon in the address bar when it kicks in, and that doesn’t happen until you revisit the inactive tab.
Tangentially, Leopeva64 also notes the 2023 redesign could make rounded corner radii larger all around, perhaps to better suit the taller Omnibox we wrote about earlier.
Notice how the rounded tab corners are bigger in the refreshed design
To test the inactive tab indicator yourself, you can enable the Chrome flag mentioned below. Even without it, Google has crammed several tangible and behind-the-scenes improvements into Chrome Beta 113 which you can take for a spin right away.
chrome://flags/#chrome-refresh-2023
