Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome have been borrowing ideas from each other for years, and Microsoft appears to have spotted another Chrome feature worth bringing over. As Windows Report has spotted, a new Tab Groups button is starting to appear in Edge Canary for people using vertical tabs. Instead of hunting through your open tabs to find a particular group, the new button provides one place to see the groups you’ve already created or start a new one.
It isn’t an entirely new feature for Edge. Microsoft’s browser has supported Tab Groups for some time, including when using vertical tabs. What’s changing is how easy those groups are to get to. That might sound like a tiny interface tweak, but anyone who routinely ends up with dozens of tabs open will probably understand why it could be useful.
Edge is putting your tab groups in one place
With vertical tabs turned on, the new Tab Groups button sits toward the top of Edge’s sidebar. Clicking it brings up your existing groups, making it much easier to jump between different collections of tabs without scrolling through the entire sidebar. You can also create a new group from the same place. The idea should be especially handy if you use groups to separate different parts of your browsing. You might have one for work, another for research, and a third containing all those articles you’re definitely going to read later.
One thing about Microsoft’s approach feels particularly familiar: Chrome already does something similar. Google has its own Tab Groups button within its vertical-tabs interface, providing a centralized view of saved groups and letting users create new ones. Edge’s version follows much the same logic, right down to making the feature easy to access from the vertical sidebar. For anyone moving between the two browsers, at least there shouldn’t be much of a learning curve.
Don’t go looking for it in Edge just yet
There is one catch. Microsoft is currently testing the change in Edge Canary, so most people using the regular version of Edge won’t see the new button yet. Canary is where Microsoft experiments with features before deciding whether they’re ready for a wider release. Things can change significantly during that process, and some experiments never make it into the stable browser.
If you’re already using Canary and want to check, you’ll need to enable vertical tabs. Edge lets you switch them on from the tab-strip menu or through the browser’s settings. Microsoft isn’t reinventing Tab Groups here, then. It’s simply making an existing feature much easier to reach, even if the solution happens to look an awful lot like the one Chrome got first.
