Chrome users complained, and Google is bringing back tab scrolling in H1 2026

Google has confirmed that tab scrolling will return to Chrome sometime in the first half of 2026. The news comes directly from a Chromium engineer responding to frustrated power users in the issue tracker after the feature disappeared with Chromium 144.

The removal hit hard when Chrome and Brave suddenly stopped supporting horizontal tab scrolling earlier this month. Users who juggled dozens or hundreds of tabs found themselves staring at tiny compressed icons instead of being able to scroll through their tab strip with a mouse wheel or dedicated buttons.

One engineer from Google acknowledged the situation on January 17, saying the team knows tab scrolling matters for power users. They explained that while Chrome has wanted to ship this feature for over four years, the old implementation had problems that kept it from ever reaching the stable channel. That’s why it got pulled.

But here’s the good news. Google is rearchitecting the entire tabstrip to support a proper scrolling system. The new version should land in Canary, Dev, and Beta channels during H1 2026, though the engineer stopped short of promising an exact timeline until development actually starts.

The frustration was real across multiple Reddit threads. Users posted about tabs being impossible to navigate, workflows getting broken, and scroll wheel clicks no longer working. Some even threatened to switch browsers entirely. One person described spending an hour trying to fix what they thought was a bug, only to discover Google deliberately killed the feature.

In a follow-up comment on January 22, the same Google engineer suggested temporary workarounds. Multi-window workflows could help immediately. Another option involves using the enterprise LTS version of Chrome, which still runs on M143 and has tab scrolling enabled, though that requires extra setup steps.

Google also pointed users toward the vertical tabs feature currently available in Chrome Canary. That implementation includes scrolling by default and should become usable for people with pinned or grouped tabs within two to four weeks.

Vertical tabs have been in development for months and represent Google catching up to what Edge, Firefox, and Vivaldi figured out years ago.

The promise to bring back horizontal tab scrolling by mid-2026 should calm some nerves. Google scrapped the old buggy version but commits to delivering a better replacement. For anyone managing research projects or just hoarding tabs, that can’t come soon enough.

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