How to Manage Your Google Chrome Tabs

Let's start with some basics. Launch Chrome on your computer and open a web page. To open a second page as a tab, just click on the + sign next to the first tab or right-click on the first tab and select New tab. You can also open a link directly into a new tab by right-clicking on it and selecting the "Open link in new tab" option.

Where the new tab opens depends on how you opened it. If you clicked the + sign at the end of your tab row, the new tab will appear at the end of the row. If you create a tab through the right-click menu, the new tab will appear to the right of your current tab.

You can duplicate a page as a new tab, a handy way to view two separate parts of the page without having to scroll up and down. To do this, right-click on the tab and select Duplicate.

Chrome allows you to organize your tabs a number of ways. Click and drag a tab left or right to reorder your tabs. You can also move a tabbed page into its own separate window if you want to see and work with it apart from your other tabs. To do this, drag the tab down from the tab row until it opens into a window. Should you wish to move the new window back into a tab, drag it by the tab and drop it anywhere on the tab row of the other instance.

You can close tabs by clicking the X or right-clicking on the tab and selecting Close tab. However, you can also close all tabs other than the one you are in by selecting Close other tabs. Close everything to the right of your open tab by clicking Close tabs to the right.

If you closed a tab by mistake, get it back by right-clicking on any tab and selecting Reopen closed tab. Chrome opens the last tab you closed. Repeat this process until you've opened all closed tabs you want to recover.

You can also reopen entire windows if you happen to close one by mistake. If this happens to you, open a new window and right-click the New tab, then select Reopen closed window. Chrome reopens all the tabs that were open when you closed the window. You can even reopen individual tabs that were closed before the window was originally closed.

Do you keep the same sites open in your browser window every day? Rather than typing in their URLs each morning, pin these sites so your browser automatically loads them up each time you open it.

Open a site you want to pin, right-click on the tab, and select Pin tab. Do the same for any other pages you want to pin and the tab will stay there, even after you close and reopen Chrome.

When Chrome is reopened, you will notice that the pinned page will appear as a small icon at the left of the tab row. Click on the icon to open the page fully. You can remove a pinned tab by right-clicking on the tab and selecting Unpin tab.

Here's a way to easily return to all your open tabs each time you launch Chrome. Click the three-dot icon () and go to Settings. Scroll to the "On startup" section and select Continue where you left off. Now you can close out Chrome and each time you restart the browser, all the tabs that were open when you shut down reappear.

Chrome's built-in features are great, but you can do more to manage your tabs through the right extensions. Let's look at a few that are available in the Chrome Store.

Right-click on a link on an existing page and then open it as a new tab. Notice what happens. The focus remains on your existing page rather than jumping to the new tab. You have to manually click the new tab to view its page. The Tabs to the Front extension automatically puts the focus on the new tab to save you that extra step.

Navigating a simple menu of tabs might be easier than hunting across the tab row for the page you want. Keepin' Tabs creates such a menu. Install the extension and then click its toolbar icon. You can select a tab from the menu to open the page. You can also move the tabs up and down within the menu, pin a tab, refresh a tab, and remove a tab.

Each tab you open in Chrome chews up a bit more of your computer's memory and resources. The Great Suspender automatically suspends any tab you haven't viewed in awhile. You can also manually control this. Click on the extension's toolbar icon. Here, you could suspend the tab immediately, set it to never suspend, suspend all other tabs, or unsuspend all tabs. To wake up a suspended tab, just refresh it.

Looking for more Google Chrome tips to make your browsing experience easier and better? We have 20 different tips for you to learn.