How to Enable Vertical Tabs in Chrome 147 (Without Flags)

To enable vertical tabs in Chrome (as of June 2026): right-click any open tab and choose Show Tabs Vertically. No flag, no extension. The tab strip moves to a collapsible left sidebar where every tab shows a readable title. Prefer menus? Settings > Appearance > Tab strip position > Side does the same thing. Workspaces and keyboard search still need an extension.

Key takeaways

• Chrome shipped vertical tabs in version 146 and dropped the flag requirement in the April 2026 stable rollout.
• Fastest path: right-click a tab → Show Tabs Vertically. Or Settings > Appearance > Tab strip position → Side.
• Native version has no workspaces, no session recovery, and no keyboard tab search. Extensions fill those gaps.

You have 30 tabs open and every one is a tiny favicon you have to hover to identify. Chrome fixed the display side of this: vertical tabs first shipped in Chrome 146 on March 18, 2026, and by April they reached the stable channel for everyone — no hidden flag to dig out. The tab bar moves to a left sidebar where every tab gets a readable title, the layout Firefox users have had for years through Sidebery. Turning it on takes one right-click. A few gaps are worth knowing before you decide whether the built-in version is enough.

How to Enable Vertical Tabs in Chrome

Since the April 2026 rollout there is no flag to flip. Two ways to switch the layout, whichever you reach for first:

Fastest — the right-click menu.

Right-click any open tab (or the empty space on the tab strip) and choose Show Tabs Vertically. The horizontal tab bar disappears and a vertical sidebar appears on the left. Right-click again and pick the same option to switch back.

Or through Settings.

Open Settings (three-dot menu → Settings), go to Appearance, scroll to Tab strip position, and switch it from Top to Side. Chrome applies the change instantly and keeps it across restarts.

That’s the whole setup. No extension, no download, no relaunch. If your build predates the rollout and the menu option is absent, the legacy route still works: set chrome://flags/#vertical-tabs to Enabled, relaunch, then change the tab strip position to Side.

What the Native Vertical Tab Strip Includes

Once enabled, the sidebar behaves like a standard tab manager with good fundamentals:

• Full title + favicon + close button per tab. No more truncated text at 20 characters.
• Resizable. Drag the right edge to narrow the sidebar to icon-only mode or widen it to show longer titles. The two extremes are a thin icon rail and a panel wide enough for most page titles to display fully.
• Tab group colors and names preserved. If you use Chrome’s Tab Groups feature, the group labels and colors carry over into the vertical strip without any reconfiguration.
• Collapsible. A small arrow at the top collapses the entire sidebar to a narrow icon rail. Chrome remembers your preference.
• Tab search button. The top of the sidebar has a search icon that opens Chrome’s built-in tab search. It is the same tab search that existed before vertical tabs, now surfaced at the top of the sidebar for easier access.
• Cross-platform. The sidebar works on Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS.

For someone who has been running 10–20 tabs and wanted a cleaner view, this hits the mark. The titles are actually readable.

What Is Still Missing

Chrome’s native implementation is version one. No roadmap speculation needed here. The gaps are concrete features that competing solutions already have:

The biggest gap for anyone doing multi-project work is workspaces. Chrome’s sidebar shows all your tabs in one flat (or grouped) list. There is no concept of switching from a “Research” context to a “Client Work” context and having each context hold its own isolated set of tabs. Tab Groups give you colors and labels. They do not isolate.

Session recovery is the second meaningful gap. Chrome’s built-in session restore is all-or-nothing — you cannot recover one set of tabs from two hours ago while keeping everything else you have opened since. Extensions that snapshot every five minutes solve this.

Keyboard navigation is the third. Tab Search in Chrome requires clicking a button. There is no keyboard shortcut equivalent to a command bar where you type a fragment of a page title and jump to it from anywhere.

If the Native Version Is Enough for You

Chrome’s native vertical tabs handle the display problem well. Tabs are legible. Groups stay organized. The sidebar collapses when you need screen space.

For daily browser use with a single project in view — one work session, one context, a manageable tab count — the built-in sidebar is a reasonable choice. There is nothing to install or maintain.

The native feature also has an advantage extensions can never match: zero performance overhead. No extension process, no background service worker, no additional memory. The sidebar renders as part of Chrome itself.

Where Extensions Still Lead

The native sidebar solves the visual layout problem. It does not solve the workflow problem — switching between multiple project contexts, recovering from accidental tab closures, navigating a large tab set with the keyboard.

SuperchargeNavigation works through Chrome’s side panel API, which is a separate UI surface from the native tab strip. You can run both simultaneously. The native tab strip shows your current tabs in the left sidebar; the SuperchargeNavigation side panel adds workspaces, session snapshots, and the command bar alongside it.

The workflow that the combination enables:

• Switch between named workspaces (Alt+K → type the workspace name) without hunting through a flat list
• Rewind to any workspace state from the past four hours via 50 auto-snapshots taken every five minutes
• Peek at a link in an overlay with Alt+Click before deciding to open a full tab
• Auto-group all tabs by domain (Alt+G) when a workspace has accumulated too many ungrouped tabs
• Deduplicate tabs — if a URL is already open somewhere in a workspace, the extension switches you to it instead of creating a duplicate
• Carry workspaces to another computer with optional sync — it rides Chrome’s or Edge’s own account sync, so nothing touches our servers and we can’t read it

Workspaces stay local by default; the sync above is opt-in, with zero telemetry either way. None of this requires disabling the native vertical tabs. It extends them.

Default or Opt-In: Where the Feature Stands

Vertical tabs moved from a hidden flag to a one-click toggle in the April 2026 stable rollout, and they remain that way through Chrome 149. They are not yet the default layout. Chrome still opens with the classic horizontal strip, and you switch to the sidebar from the right-click menu or Appearance settings.

Once you switch, the choice sticks. Chrome remembers the vertical layout across updates and restarts, so this is a one-time setup. Whether Google eventually makes vertical the default for everyone is unannounced as of June 2026, but the feature itself is no longer experimental — it ships in stable and needs no flag to use.

Which Setup Fits Your Use Case

If you have 20 or fewer tabs across one active project and want a cleaner sidebar — the native vertical tabs are enough, no extensions needed.

If you manage multiple projects simultaneously and lose tabs or context regularly — add SuperchargeNavigation alongside the native sidebar. The two do not conflict.

If you need session snapshots specifically — because you close tabs accidentally or do research sessions that need rewinding — SuperchargeNavigation’s 50 auto-snapshots are the only local, zero-telemetry option available for Chrome.

If you want the command bar (searching all open tabs by title fragment from a keyboard shortcut) — that is not available natively in any Chrome version. Alt+K is extension territory for now.

The native vertical tabs are a good first release. The practical ceiling for power users is higher than what Chrome ships today.