I gave Chrome's vertical tabs a week, and going back to tabs across the top feels wrong

Published Sep 13, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT Mahnoor Faisal is a tech journalist covering AI and productivity tools with bylines at XDA, SlashGear, MakeUseOf, Laptop Mag, and Android Police. She's been writing professionally since she was sixteen, and has since penned hundreds of articles. This includes in-depth coverage of AI tools like NotebookLM to breaking news across the AI space. Her passion for technology started when she received her first iPod Touch (4th generation) on her 8th birthday, and she's been deep in the tech world ever since. Currently pursuing a degree in computer science, Mahnoor brings both a journalist's eye and a technical foundation to her coverage of how AI is reshaping the way we work and learn. There are always things you only realize you need until you actually get your hands on them. The tech world is particularly guilty of this. No one woke up and thought, “Hey, I need a phone that flips and folds,” until every manufacturer started making one and suddenly carrying a tiny tablet in your pocket didn’t sound so ridiculous. No one thought they needed a 14-inch laptop that would roll out into a 17-inch one until Lenovo made a concept laptop that does exactly that (though it's just a concept right now). No one thought they'd be spending a significant chunk of their day talking to a robot on their phone until OpenAI launched ChatGPT publically. Browser features work more or less the same way, and vertical tabs are the perfect example. I recently gave Chrome's vertical tabs a week, and now the old layout just feels weirdly difficult to go back to. Vertical tabs fix everything I hate about traditional tabs Built for tab hoarders like me Given my job has to do with writing and a lot of research, I always have dozens upon dozens of tabs open. Traditionally, browsers have kept them scattered across a strip right below the address bar. This works perfectly fine when you only have a handful open. Once that number begins to climb, though, things get crammed incredibly fast. There’s no easy way to tell these tabs apart other than relying on the tab’s favicon, opening each one, or randomly hovering over them until you finally find the page you were looking for. Vertical tabs are designed to fix exactly this problem. Exactly as the name suggests, vertical tabs move the strip of tabs from the top of the browser to a sidebar running down the side of the window. Unlike horizontal tabs, though, opening another tab doesn’t make every other one progressively narrower. Whether you have ten tabs open or fifty, each one still gets roughly the same amount of space in the list. This way, you can see all your open tabs with their titles still visible, rather than watching them shrink down to little more than favicons as you open more of them. Of course, this means you can scroll through the list of tabs and find the precise one you’re looking for without having to play a guessing game. If you're working on a smaller screen (say, a typical 13-inch laptop) and think the vertical tabs are taking up too much real estate, you always have the option to collapse the sidebar. This reduces it to a much narrower strip showing only each tab’s favicon, and you can expand it again whenever you need to see the full titles. That said, I think there's no better feature suited to widescreen displays better than vertical tabs. Most websites don't make full use of all that extra horizontal space anyway, so giving up a small chunk of it for a sidebar feels like a much better trade than having tabs eat into the already limited vertical space at the top. Chrome finally has native vertical tabs You no longer need a workaround While a lot of the more niche browsers, like Arc, Vivaldi, Brave, Zen, and a few others, offer vertical tabs, the majority of mainstream browsers have been fairly slow to adopt them. Chrome, which is arguably the most widely used browser in the world, only added native support for vertical tabs fairly recently. Chrome began testing native vertical tabs in the Canary channel in November 2025, but only began rolling them out more widely earlier this year. Google formally announced the feature in April 2026, finally giving Chrome users a built-in way to move their tabs to the side of the browser without relying on an extension or experimental workaround. To use vertical tabs in Chrome, all you need to do is right-click on any Chrome window and click Show Tabs Vertically from the options that appear. That’s it! The strip of tabs will automatically move from the top of the browser to the side of the window. Tab Groups make so much more sense vertically Finally, some order in the chaos You’ll find three options at the very top of the tab strip: Collapse Tabs, Tab Groups, and Tab Search. While collapsing tabs and searching through them are capabilities that need little explanation, tab groups in vertical tabs specifically are something I want to highlight. Tab groups aren’t new to Chrome, of course. You can group related tabs together, give each group a name and color, and collapse the entire thing when you don’t need it. But the feature makes considerably more sense in a vertical layout. Instead of squeezing several groups alongside dozens of individual tabs into one increasingly cramped row, each group feels like its own section in the sidebar. I can keep all the research for one article together, collapse it when I move onto something else, and still immediately see where everything is when I come back. Vertical tabs are truly one of those features that you’ll only appreciate once you go hands-on with them. While they take a bit of getting used to, especially if you’ve spent years looking for your tabs across the top of the browser, the layout starts to feel surprisingly natural after a while.