This handy Google Chrome desktop feature is coming to And...

This handy Google Chrome desktop feature is coming to Android The Google Chrome logo against an orange background with the AP logo

By Chethan Rao Published 54 minutes ago

Chethan is a reporter at Android Police, focusing on the weekend news coverage for the site. He has covered tech for over a decade with multiple publications, including the likes of Times Internet, Guiding Tech, and Android Headlines, to name a few. Chethan's love for Android dates back to the days of the Samsung/Google Nexus S, with his first Android phone being the HTC Desire HD back in 2010. Away from work, he's on the lookout for live cricket streams or NBA highlights. He also enjoys the occasional hour or two of console/mobile gaming whenever time permits.

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Among a long list of Android web browsers, Google Chrome unsurprisingly stands out as the browser of choice for many. While it's not uncommon for Chrome desktop features to make their way to Android, Google can often take its sweet time rolling them out. It looks like that won't be the case with tab pinning, as Chrome for Android is showing early signs of this feature's arrival on your phone.

Tab pinning is already live on Chrome Canary for Android, the experimental version of the browser used to test new features before they are widely rolled out (via Android Authority). In addition to being available by default on Chrome Canary, tab pinning can also be found in Chrome stable by enabling a flag (chrome://flags/#android-pinned-tabs) and relaunching the browser.

A wider rollout shouldn't be far away

Pinned tabs on Chrome for Android (stable)

Once you've enabled the flag (or have Chrome Canary installed), open the tab overview screen and long-press an open tab to find the "Pin" option in the floating menu.

When pinned, these tabs lose the "x" in the top-right corner of each open tab, with a pin icon appearing in its place. To remove a pinned tab, users simply need to long-press the tab again, then tap "Unpin."

This can be time-consuming if you've got plenty of pinned tabs. Thankfully, tapping "Close all tabs" in the tab overview's three-dot menu removes all tabs from the list, which takes much less time than long-pressing each tab and manually unpinning them.

This process also ensures that a pinned tab doesn't accidentally close when you're rapidly hitting that x button to close the remaining tabs.

The fact that the feature is partially available in both Canary and stable versions of Chrome suggests we might not be far from seeing pinned tabs go live for all Chrome users on Android. But exactly when that will happen remains a mystery at this point.

I feel this would be a decent alternative to bookmarking a page, now that a tab can be permanently pinned to the top-left of the screen. However, since pinned Chrome tabs can't sync across devices (yet), we don't see bookmarks becoming obsolete anytime soon.

News of this comes days after a vertical tab layout was spotted in Chrome Canary, though the feature has been in development since July. While this would be a major addition to Google's web browser, it is already available in rival offerings, such as Firefox and Microsoft Edge.

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