Chrome tab groups versus real workspaces

Google Chrome tab groups let you right-click a tab, choose Add tab to group, give the group a name and a color, and collapse it into a single label on the tab strip. Closed groups are saved and can be reopened, and if Chrome sync is on, changes to groups follow you to every device signed in to the same Google Account. That covers organizing pages by topic or task. What tab groups do not do is separate logins: every tab in every group shares the same cookies, so a work Gmail and a personal Gmail cannot live in two groups as two signed-in accounts. This guide covers the exact steps from Chrome's own help pages, checked on October 18, 2026, the settings most people never turn on, and how to tell when a group is the wrong tool. This site is published by the maker of an app aggregation browser for macOS, which is mentioned once near the end.

How to create, name and collapse a group

The steps below follow the Chrome help page on managing tabs.

1. Right-click any tab and select Add tab to group, then New group or an existing group.
2. Type a name. Pick one of the colors.
3. Drag more tabs onto the group label to add them. Right-click a tab and choose Remove from group to take one out.
4. Click the group's name or colored circle to collapse it. Only the label stays on the strip.

Two smaller habits make groups far more useful. First, select several tabs at once before grouping. Chrome's help describes holding a modifier key while clicking each tab (Ctrl in the help text, Command on a Mac) or holding Shift and clicking the last tab of a range, then right-clicking any highlighted tab and choosing Add tabs to group. The same bulk menu can move the highlighted tabs to another window, pin them, mute them or close them together. Building a group of eight tabs in one move is faster than building it one tab at a time.

Second, name groups by what will happen next, not by topic. Google's own announcement of tab groups, published on May 13, 2020, described people grouping by urgency ("ASAP", "this week", "later") or by progress ("in progress", "need to follow up"). A group called "Reply today" gets closed when it is done. A group called "Marketing" tends to grow forever.

Close, delete and ungroup are three different things

This is the part of tab groups that causes the most surprises, and it is spelled out in Chrome's help.

Action	What happens to the tabs	What happens to the group	Effect on other devices
Close group	Tabs close	Saved, can be reopened	Saved state syncs
Delete group	Tabs close	Removed	Removed on every device using the same Google Account
Ungroup	Tabs stay open	Removed	Group removed on every device using the same Google Account

Close is the safe action. Chrome's help states that a closed group is not deleted and is saved in the bookmarks bar or in the menu, so it can be opened again later. Delete and Ungroup both remove the group from other devices signed in to the same account, not just the one in front of you. Someone who ungroups a set of tabs on a laptop to tidy up will find that the group is gone from the desktop too.

To make saved groups easy to reach, two settings under Settings, Appearance help:

• Show tab groups in bookmarks bar places every saved group on the bookmarks bar.
• Automatically pin new tab groups to the bookmarks bar pins each new group as it is created, including groups created on other devices with the same account.

One more distinction matters here. Collapsing a group is not the same as closing it. The help page describes collapsing as showing only the group's name or colored circle on the tab strip, which means the tabs inside are still open. A collapsed group of twenty tabs takes up one label of space, but it is still twenty open pages. When a task is paused for days rather than minutes, Close group is the action that actually takes those tabs out of the window.

With both settings on, the bookmarks bar becomes a shelf of closed groups. Open one when the task comes back, close it when the task is done. That is the workflow tab groups are best at.

Finding tabs when groups are not enough

Groups organize tabs, but they do not help much when the strip holds fifty items and the one needed is somewhere inside. Chrome has two built-in ways to search open tabs.

Tab Search is on by default and pinned to the tab strip. On a Mac, Command + Shift + A opens it from the keyboard. Type part of a title and press Return.

The address bar can search tabs too. Type @tabs, press Tab or Space, then type the search. This keeps hands on the keyboard and works the same way as any other address bar search.

Chrome now also offers vertical tabs, which move the tab strip to the side of the window. The help page lists what changes: all page titles become readable, the list scrolls, the strip can be resized, and in collapsed view hovering over a tab or group expands the full name. To turn it on, right-click a blank part of the tab strip and choose Show Tabs Vertically, or go to Settings, Appearance and set Tab position to Vertical. For anyone whose main complaint was that titles had shrunk to unreadable slivers, this one setting may fix more than any number of groups.

Finally, split view shows two sites in one window. According to the split view help page, right-click an inactive tab and choose New split view with current tab, or drag a tab to the left, right or bottom edge of the window. One side is always the active view, and toolbar actions apply to that side only.

The line tab groups do not cross

All of the above is about arranging pages. None of it changes who you are signed in as.

Every tab in a Chrome profile shares the same cookie jar. If a tab in the "Client A" group is signed in to Gmail with one address, a new Gmail tab in the "Personal" group opens the same signed-in session. Google's own account switcher lets several Google accounts be signed in at once inside one session, but each tab still has to be pointed at the right account, and links clicked from Slack or a calendar invite open in whichever account the service treats as the default.

The tool Chrome provides for real separation is profiles. The Chrome profiles help page says profiles keep bookmarks, history, passwords and other settings separate, and suggests them for keeping work and personal accounts apart. A new profile is created from the Profile icon at the top right with Add Chrome profile.

Profiles solve the login problem at a cost:

• Each profile opens in its own window. Switching profile means switching window.
• Tab groups belong to one profile. A group in the work profile is not visible in the personal one.
• Extensions are installed per profile, so a password manager or other tool has to be set up again in each.
• The help page also warns that removing a profile erases its bookmarks, history, passwords and other settings from the computer.

For two contexts, this is manageable. For a freelancer with four clients, each with its own Google Workspace account and its own Slack, the result is four or five Chrome windows, each with its own groups, and Command + backtick cycling through them.

Groups, profiles and app workspaces side by side

There are three different units here, and each solves a different problem.

	Chrome tab group	Chrome profile	App workspace in an app aggregation browser
What it groups	Pages, by topic or task	Everything, by identity	Web apps, by context
Separate logins	No	Yes, per profile	Yes, typically per app
Same service, two accounts at once	Only through the service's own account switcher	Yes, one per window	Yes, side by side in one window
How you switch	Click a group label	Switch windows	Click or keyboard shortcut
Saved when closed	Yes, if closed rather than deleted	Yes	Yes
Syncs to other devices	With Chrome sync	With Chrome sync per profile	Depends on the product

The first column wins whenever the problem is "too many pages about different things". The second column wins whenever the problem is "two identities that must never mix", such as a work machine policy. The third column exists for a narrower case: many web apps, several accounts, used all day, where the pages themselves are not the problem.

App aggregation browsers on the Mac generally treat each web app as its own entry with its own saved session. Gmail for one client and Gmail for another become two separate entries that stay signed in. Wavebox, Shift, Rambox and Ferdium all work in this space with different free limits and pricing, and the differences are laid out in the comparison with Wavebox and the comparison with Shift. One such app for macOS gives every app its own cookie container and groups apps into workspaces with their own color and default search engine, as described on its Workspaces page. Its free plan covers one workspace with up to three apps, and adding a second account of the same service is a Pro feature.

Deciding which one the situation calls for

Three questions sort most cases.

Is the problem finding things, or being signed in as the wrong person? If the problem is finding things, stay in Chrome. Turn on vertical tabs, learn Command + Shift + A for Tab Search, and use groups named by next action. If the problem is being signed in as the wrong person, groups will not help, however carefully they are named.

How many identities are involved? Two identities, such as work and personal, fit comfortably in two Chrome profiles. Beyond three, window switching starts to cost more than it saves, and that is when a tool built around per-app sessions starts to make sense.

Are the tabs pages or apps? Pages come and go: articles, documentation, search results. Apps stay open all day: mail, chat, calendar, a project tracker. Groups are good for pages. Apps that never close are better treated as fixed entries than as tabs that happen to be pinned inside a group.

A common working setup combines two of these. Chrome with vertical tabs and a few closed groups on the bookmarks bar handles research and reading. Long-running apps, especially those with more than one account, move somewhere they can stay signed in without competing for space on the tab strip.

What to change first

Turn on Show tab groups in bookmarks bar, and from now on use Close group rather than Ungroup or Delete when a task is finished. If the real problem is two or more accounts of the same web apps, move those apps into a per-app layout such as SpaceDeck and keep Chrome's groups for pages.