How to Get Vertical Tabs in Chrome

For years, the horizontal tab bar in Chrome was the default and only option, and most users simply tolerated it getting worse as tab count climbed. Browsers like Edge and Arc made vertical tabs a serious productivity feature while Chrome stayed silent. That changed in 2026.

Chrome 146, released in March 2026, shipped native vertical tabs. The feature completed its rollout to all desktop users in April 2026. You no longer need a flag, an extension, or a workaround. You right-click a tab and choose “Show Tabs Vertically.”

This guide covers the exact steps to enable it, what Chrome’s implementation actually does (and where it falls short), how Edge and Arc approached the same problem, which third-party extensions are worth knowing, and why vertical tabs alone won’t solve the tab overload problem most people actually have.

Chrome’s Native Vertical Tabs: What Shipped and When

Chrome had been testing vertical tab layouts in Canary and Beta builds throughout 2025, with a chrome://flags/#vertical-tabs flag appearing in some pre-release versions. Chrome 146 was the stable release that brought the feature to everyone, landing in March 2026. The April 2026 rollout pushed it from “some users” to “all desktop users.”

Google uses staged rollouts for new features, which means not every Chrome installation received the update at exactly the same time. If you’re running Chrome 146 or later and still don’t see the option, go to chrome://settings/help and check your version. Any fully updated Chrome install on a desktop platform should have the feature available now.

The feature landed on Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. Mobile Chrome — both Android and iOS — does not have vertical tabs, and Google has not announced plans to add them to mobile.

It’s worth being clear about what this release means for the flag history: the chrome://flags/#vertical-tabs path that existed in earlier builds is no longer the way to get vertical tabs. The feature is now a standard browser setting accessible through right-click or through Settings > Appearance. If you’re looking at old guides that tell you to visit chrome://flags and flip a switch, those instructions predate the April 2026 rollout and are no longer the correct path for updated Chrome installations.

How to Enable Vertical Tabs in Chrome

The process takes about ten seconds on a current Chrome installation:

1. Open any Chrome window that has tabs visible.
2. Right-click any tab in the horizontal tab strip at the top of the window.
3. In the context menu, select Show Tabs Vertically.
4. The horizontal strip disappears and your tabs move into a sidebar on the left side of the window.

If you prefer going through Settings: Settings > Appearance > Tab position, then change the dropdown from “Top” to “Side.”

Once the sidebar is active:

• To collapse it: Click the small arrow or chevron at the top of the sidebar. The sidebar narrows to favicon-only mode, showing a small icon for each tab without the title. This is useful when you’re working in something that needs the full horizontal width of the screen.
• To expand it: Click the same arrow again. The sidebar widens and tab titles become visible.
• To switch back: Right-click anywhere in the sidebar and choose Show Tabs Horizontally, or return to Settings > Appearance > Tab position and set it back to “Top.”

The layout change applies to the current window. Open a new window and verify it inherits your preference if you want consistency across all Chrome windows.

What Chrome’s Vertical Tabs Include — and What They Leave Out

Chrome’s vertical tab sidebar does the core job well. Here’s an honest accounting of what’s there and what isn’t.

What is included:

• Tabs stacked vertically in a left sidebar, in the order they were opened
• A collapsible sidebar with icon-only mode for narrow viewing
• Tab group support — groups you’ve already created appear as labeled, collapsible sections within the sidebar
• Right-click context menu on individual tabs (same options as the horizontal layout: reload, mute, pin, add to group, close)
• All standard keyboard shortcuts work unchanged
• Ctrl+Shift+A opens Chrome’s tab search overlay and works alongside the vertical layout

What is not included:

• Saved sessions or workspaces: There is no way to save a named set of tabs and reopen them later. If Chrome closes, session restore brings back your tabs, but you can’t save a project context and switch between multiple named workspaces.
• Tab sleeping: Chrome has a memory saver setting that can suspend inactive tabs, but there’s no dedicated per-tab sleep control equivalent to Edge’s sleeping tabs feature.
• Keyboard navigation within the sidebar: You can’t use arrow keys to navigate the tab list in the sidebar the way you might navigate a file explorer.
• Tree-style or hierarchical tabs: There is no parent-child relationship between tabs opened from links. Each tab is a flat entry in the sidebar list.
• Cross-device sync of tab groups or layout: Tab group names and colors sync across devices through Chrome Sync, but the vertical vs. horizontal layout setting is per-device.

For users who just want their tabs to stop shrinking to indecipherable icons, Chrome’s implementation is a genuine improvement. For users who have been using Edge workspaces or who spent time in Arc’s sidebar, the current Chrome feature will feel like a first version — which it is.

How Edge’s Vertical Tabs Compare

Microsoft Edge shipped vertical tabs in early 2021, roughly five years before Chrome added them natively. This timing is why “chrome tabs vertical” became a frequently searched term in the first place: users saw the feature working in another browser and wanted it without switching.

Edge’s vertical tabs include everything Chrome’s does — collapsible sidebar, group support, favicon-only mode — plus several features Chrome still lacks:

Workspaces: Named sets of tabs you can save, close, and reopen as a complete group. If you’re researching a project and want to set it aside and switch to something else, you give the workspace a name, close it, and it waits. When you return, all the tabs open where they were. Chrome has no equivalent.

Sleeping Tabs: Edge detects tabs that haven’t been used in a while and puts them into a low-memory state. The tab stays in the sidebar but uses significantly less RAM. On machines with many tabs open, this is a real performance difference. Chrome’s memory saver feature does something similar but is less configurable and less visible.

Collections: A built-in save-for-later panel in the Edge sidebar, separate from bookmarks. Users can drag tabs into a collection for later without committing to a full bookmark.

If you’re already invested in Chrome — extensions, saved passwords, Sync settings — switching browsers solely for vertical tabs is probably not worth it. But if you’re evaluating browsers for the first time or doing a clean setup, Edge has had more time to develop the surrounding feature set.

What Arc Demonstrated Was Possible

Arc Browser, built by the Browser Company, launched with a sidebar-first design where vertical tabs were the default, not an option. Arc’s approach was more radical than anything Chrome or Edge offered:

Spaces let users create multiple named contexts within a single browser window. Each Space had its own tabs, pinned sites, and color. Switching between Spaces felt like switching between separate environments rather than just changing a tab group.

Auto-archiving removed tabs that hadn’t been used in a set number of days. This forced intentional behavior: if a page mattered, you pinned it or bookmarked it. If it was just open and forgotten, it eventually disappeared. The result was a tab list that stayed manageable by default rather than growing without bound.

Pinned sites in the permanent section of the sidebar represented frequently visited destinations — they stayed there regardless of what else was open. The rest of the sidebar was for active tabs, which auto-archived on a schedule.

Arc entered maintenance mode in May 2025 and was acquired by Atlassian in September 2025. The Browser Company directed new users toward other products. This doesn’t erase what Arc demonstrated: a browser could be built around the sidebar from the start, auto-archiving could solve tab accumulation structurally, and Spaces showed there was demand for genuine context separation that tab groups alone don’t provide.

Chrome’s vertical tabs are a step in the direction Arc pointed. The gap between “a sidebar that lists your tabs vertically” and “a browser designed around a sidebar” remains wide.

Third-Party Extensions Worth Knowing

If Chrome’s native vertical tabs don’t cover your workflow, several extensions fill specific gaps. These work alongside the browser’s native sidebar or replace it with their own side panel integration:

Vertical Tabs (Chrome Web Store): Shows all open tabs in Chrome’s side panel with support for tab groups and a search field. This is one of the most actively maintained options and the starting point most users try when they want tree-style or more structured vertical tab management.

Chrome Vertical Tabs: A minimalist side panel tool focused on fast tab switching across multiple windows. Less feature-heavy than some alternatives, which is its appeal for users who want the layout without additional complexity.

Workona: Workspace-based tab management with named project contexts, saved sessions, and the ability to close all tabs from a workspace and reopen them later. Fills the session-saving gap that Chrome’s native vertical tabs don’t address. The free tier covers basic use.

Tab Manager Plus: Adds a fast, keyboard-searchable tab interface with thumbnails. Solves the “find the tab by title” problem through search rather than through a better visual layout. Useful for users who have many tabs open and need to locate specific ones quickly.

Sidebery is worth mentioning even though it’s Firefox-only: it’s the standard-setter for sidebar tab management with tree view, and knowing it exists explains why Firefox users have higher baseline expectations for what a tab sidebar can do. Chrome’s extension ecosystem hasn’t produced an equivalent at the same quality level.

For most Chrome users, the practical approach is to start with the native vertical tabs feature and try one extension only if a specific limitation becomes a real friction point. Installing multiple tab managers simultaneously tends to create more confusion than it solves — different extensions fighting over the same side panel real estate.

The Real Reason You Still Have Forty Tabs Open

Vertical tabs help with navigation. They don’t fix why you have so many tabs to navigate in the first place.

Watch how most people use tabs and a pattern emerges. Some tabs are genuinely active — a form being filled out, a document being edited, a page being read right now. Those tabs belong open. But a large fraction of open tabs are deferred: pages someone opened intending to read later, reference material being kept accessible, links that felt important enough to keep visible but not urgent enough to act on.

The common thread in deferred tabs is usually the same: people don’t close them because they don’t trust they’ll be able to find the page again. The tab is more reliable as a location marker than a bookmark would be.

This is a direct indictment of Chrome’s bookmark system. The built-in bookmark manager has no full-text search, no dead-link detection, and no way to find a page by remembering a phrase from the content rather than the exact title. Bookmarks you made years ago become effectively unfindable unless you happen to remember which folder you filed them in. Given that, keeping a tab open really is more reliable than bookmarking.

The fix isn’t a better visual arrangement for open tabs. The fix is making bookmarks actually work for retrieval.

Bookmend is a free Chrome extension that adds full-text search to your existing Chrome bookmarks — the ones already in your browser, no import needed. It also runs dead-link detection across your entire bookmark library and can recover broken links through the Wayback Machine. Once you can search your bookmarks by typing a word from the content, the site name, or a phrase you remember from the page, bookmarking and closing a tab stops feeling like losing it.

Save and search every tab you bookmark. Install Bookmend free — and close the tabs you’ve been keeping open just to avoid losing them.

Vertical tabs and reliable bookmark search together cover different parts of the same problem: the vertical layout helps you navigate the tabs you do keep open, and searchable bookmarks mean you can keep far fewer tabs open in the first place.

Tips for Getting More from Chrome’s Tab Sidebar

Once vertical tabs are running, a few practices make the layout work better day to day.

Use tab groups seriously: Right-click any tab and choose “Add tab to new group.” Give it a name and a color. In the vertical sidebar, tab groups become collapsible labeled sections. This is meaningfully different from the horizontal layout, where groups are color-coded but titles are still hard to read once the bar fills up. In the sidebar, a collapsed group label tells you what’s in it.

Learn Ctrl+Shift+A: This keyboard shortcut opens Chrome’s built-in tab search, which works the same whether your layout is horizontal or vertical. Type any part of a tab’s title or URL and it filters instantly. For sessions with many tabs open, this is frequently faster than scrolling the sidebar looking for a specific tab.

Collapse the sidebar when you need width: Spreadsheets, wide documents, code editors, and video players often benefit from the full horizontal width of the browser. Collapsing the sidebar to icon-only mode gives you the space back without losing the vertical layout. One click to collapse, one click to expand when you need to see titles again.

Pin stable tabs: Right-click a tab you visit every day — email, calendar, a project dashboard — and choose “Pin.” Pinned tabs in the vertical layout appear at the top of the sidebar as small favicon-only entries that stay put while other tabs come and go below them. This creates a de-facto permanent section at the top of your sidebar, loosely equivalent to what Arc did with pinned sites.

Keep expanded view for similar tabs: If you have multiple Google Docs tabs, multiple Gmail windows, or multiple GitHub pull request pages open simultaneously, their favicons are identical. Collapse the sidebar and you have no way to distinguish them. Keep the sidebar expanded when working with many tabs that share the same favicon, and collapse it only when the visual distinction between tabs is already obvious.