If you tend to keep dozens of tabs open while working, studying, or researching, the traditional horizontal tab layout in Google Chrome can quickly become cluttered and difficult to manage. That’s exactly where Vertical Tabs step in.
Vertical tabs move your tabs from the top of the browser into a clean, scrollable sidebar, making them far easier to organize and navigate, especially on a Chromebook where screen space is limited. In this guide, we’ll walk you through how to enable and start using vertical tabs on your Chromebook.
How to Enable Vertical Tabs on Chromebook
Google is finally bringing native vertical tabs to the stable version of ChromeOS, something many users have been waiting for. While the feature is still in development and hasn’t been fully rolled out yet, it is already available in ChromeOS 146 as an experimental option.
If your Chromebook is updated to the latest version, you can enable vertical tabs manually through the Chrome flags page. Here’s how you can do it:
1. Start by opening the Google Chrome browser on your Chromebook.
2. Click on the address bar, type chrome://flags, and then press Enter to open the experimental features page.
3. In the search bar at the top, type Vertical Tabs. When the relevant flag appears, click the dropdown menu next to it and change the setting to Enabled.
4. Finally, click the Restart button at the bottom of the screen to relaunch Chrome and apply the changes.
How to Use Vertical Tabs on Chromebook
Once the feature is enabled, here’s how you can start using it. You can turn on vertical tabs using the tab bar menu, or you can use the Chrome browser appearance settings. Let’s discuss both methods.
1. Open the Chrome browser.
2. Right-click on the tab bar area and select Move tab to the side from the context menu.
3. Your tabs will instantly shift to a vertical panel on the left side of the screen, as you can see in the screenshot below.
4. Alternatively, you can turn it on from Settings. Open the Chrome browser, click on the three-dot icon, select Settings, then click on the Appearance option. Look for the Tab strip position setting, and from the drop-down menu, select Side.
5. The width of the sidebar can be adjusted by dragging its border with the mouse, and there is also a minimized mode that collapses the sidebar to display only the website icons (favicons).
6. Furthermore, you can also pin tabs, group tabs, and more, so basic operations can be performed almost the same way as with the default display position.
When Will It Be Officially Available?
Vertical tabs can completely change how you browse on a Chromebook. The tab layout feature, already adopted by competing browsers, is now available in the stable version of ChromeOS 146 via a flag.
The official rollout for Chromebooks is expected in ChromeOS 147, which is likely to be released around May 19, 2026. In the meantime, you can try enabling the flag to experiment with side tabs.
