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Google's Chrome web browser helped to define the tabbed style of browsing we all now use. Over the course of a day, many of you will open dozens, if not hundreds, of tabs. Whether it's a page you like to commonly check for updates, a recipe you want to keep for dinner that night, or a slew of work-related tabs you plan to get back to the next day, you can build up a massive collection very quickly. 

Of course, you could go through them, bookmarking what you need to and discarding the rest. But, there's a faster, simpler way that lets you hang on to all of your precious tabs while categorizing them into easy-to-use groups. Best of all, it's built right into Chrome. Let us show you how to use Chrome's tab groups to get your hoard of browser tabs organized once and for all. 

Google's own example of tab groups in action

Estimated time: 1-10 minutes (depending on how many tabs you're organizing)

Whichever OS you're using, the required dialogue will look essentially identical to this one, though the type of click required to access it may vary

To get started, you'll need to create you first tab group. It's simple to do. Just go to any open tab that you'd like to include in the new group and right-click or two-finger click–depending on if you're using a mouse, or trackpad, and if you're on Windows, macOS, or Chrome OS. Once you've done this, look for the Add tab to new group option (highlighted in the red box above).

This is the main hub for controlling, naming, and color-coding your tab groups

Once you click Add tab to new group the dialogue box seen above will pop up. First, you'll want to name your group. Choose something representative of what you'll keep in it, like "Work" for your remote working tabs, "Shopping" for your holiday gift research, or "Entertainment" for your favorite streaming sites. Once you've chosen a name and typed it in, you can also choose a color for the group. These are very helpful in quickly finding and identifying tab groups in your peripheral vision, especially if you're consistent with which color you associate with which types of group (red for Work and blue for Entertainment, for instance). 

The organization process may take a few minutes the first time, but it will save you tons of wasted time later

Once you've created at least one group, you can begin to organize your tabs.  When you're ready to start organizing, find the next tab you'd like to group and right-click it. You'll see a new option named Add tab to group, with a sub-menu that pops out. Within this sub-menu, you can either add that to any of your existing groups, or create a new group with it as the first tab. Alternately, you can simply grab a tab with your mouse and drag it into the group by dropping it among the group's existing tabs. Creating any subsequent groups you'd like works just like the process explained in Step 2. 

Once you've got any tabs you'd like to group organized into their respective categories, you're pretty much done. But, there are a few things you should know to get the most out of tab groups:

Not always. Chrome will attempt to save all of your grouped tabs in much the same way that it attempts to retain any non-grouped tabs when you suffer a crash and need to restart. Of course, this is not guaranteed to work 100% of the time, and it's still recommended that you bookmark, or at least Pin, any tabs with any extremely important web pages you may have open. 

Pinning a tab remains a good, fast way to preserve it, with a few unique benefits that tab groups don't offer: 

Just think of tab groups and pinned tabs as two tools in your organizational arsenal with similar purposes but different characteristics.

Yes. Almost every major browser has some form of tab grouping now included.