Ever since February, you might have noticed that the Chrome tabs on your Android phone aren’t what they used to be. Instead of the card tabbing system where you simply flicked away those that weren’t needed, Chrome now tries to group tabs in a supposedly thematic manner, like the option it provides for desktop users.
Unfortunately, Google felt it necessary to enforce grouping as the default way for arranging your tabs, and if one glorious morning you woke up after a Chrome update to find a perplexing array of preview snapshots that you had to learn to deal with, you are not alone.
It is, in practice, often a fairly random grouping, too, unless you’ve opened them from one site, and they need an extra tap or two to be dismissed. Here’s what you need to do to ungroup Chrome tabs and return to the old card tabs view.
Turn off Chrome tabs grouping and grid view on your phone
- Open Chrome for Android.
- Type or paste chrome://flags in the address bar.
- Search for the Tab Grid Layout flag, and tap on the drop-down menu.
- Select Disabled from the Tab Grid Layout options.
- Restart the Chrome for Android browser to get rid of the grid layout.
- Close and reopen the Chrome browser once again to switch from tab groups back to good ol’ card view.