Google is testing a new "Focus tab" feature in Chrome Canary — here's what it does

An upcoming feature called “Focus tab” is being tested on Chrome Canary. It’s a memory-saving feature, so it automatically freezes the tabs that are outside the chosen “Focus tab” group.

Information about this test on Canary was initially posted by @Leopeva64 on X. I have attached the post below, and it also includes several screenshots and a video demo of the feature in action.

Basically, you can select one tab or a group of tabs to focus on, and if you click on the “Focus tabs” button, it’ll hide the rest of the tabs from the tab strip. The hidden tabs will automatically be frozen, so they’ll be in sleep mode. This reduces RAM usage, so the feature is targeting memory efficiency. The focused tabs can be added to a group as well.

If you want to focus on something without the distraction of having other irrelevant tabs around, you can create your own set of “Focus tabs,” while the other tabs disappear into the background. It does not close these tabs. They’re just not taking up memory space anymore, but you can come back to them after you’re done with your “Focus tabs” session.

To check for this feature, I’ve updated to Chrome Canary v156.0.8077.0. It’s the latest version on macOS at the time of writing.

As you can see in the screenshot attached below, the entire Focus tab option is missing from the submenu when I right-click on the tab. However, the original source has demonstrated the feature on a Windows system, and there’s a chance it hasn’t made it to macOS yet. Google typically pushes these features a bit earlier to Windows than macOS, so it could take a bit of time before we see it on the macOS version of Chrome Canary. The stable version would be a while away.

I checked for any relevant flags with the keyword “Focus tabs,” but found nothing.

In other Chrome news, Google is preparing support for Gemini voice input on Chrome for Android. More on that here.

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