Google is quietly bringing back Chrome’s tab scrolling feature after removing it earlier

Google is working on bringing back the Chrome feature that lets you scroll through your open tabs with the mouse wheel or scroll buttons. At the moment, the tabs squeeze into a tiny strip, which isn’t ideal.

Information about this change was initially posted by @Leopeva64 on X. You can view the relevant media attached below.

The first signs of this showed up in Chrome Canary. A new option called “Unpin scroll buttons” was found. This is located in the menu that appears when you right-click the top of the browser window.

However, the feature itself and the actual buttons required to enable it are still unavailable. The new menu entry is currently grayed out. This hints that people might be able to pin/unpin these scroll buttons according to their preference.

This is a direct user-facing change to the tab bar. When you have a lot of open tabs, they’ll remain usable in size, and you can just scroll left or right to reach the tabs you want, instead of them looking cluttered, unorganized, and messy.

This was an extremely useful feature that was already present on Chrome, but Google has decided to remove it. The image below shows how some people were annoyed at the random removal of this feature.

I’ve checked for this option on the latest version of Chrome Canary. However, I only see “Unpin tab search” and “Unpin Gemini,” so it hasn’t arrived on my version yet. Moreover, the original source depicts the changes on a Windows system, and I’m running macOS.

Browsing through the available flags, I also found one that says “Tab strip declutter.” This one’s different, and it automatically manages the available tabs. It’s not the same as the scrollable tabs feature.

In other Chrome news, Google is moving closer to full GPC support. More on that here. Gemini in Chrome on Android is also official in the US now.

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