The Horizontal Tab Scrolling Feature
By default, when you open too many tabs in Google Chrome, the tabs shrink in size until they become tiny slivers, displaying only the website’s favicon. This makes it incredibly difficult to tell which tab is which. To solve this, Google introduced an experimental feature called “Scrollable TabStrip.” When enabled, instead of shrinking infinitely, tabs maintain a minimum readable width. Once the tab bar is full, left and right arrow buttons appear at the ends of the bar, allowing you to physically scroll horizontally through your open tabs (or use the scroll wheel on your mouse to slide through them).
While this is a fantastic feature for heavy researchers who keep 50+ tabs open, it completely changes muscle memory for users who rely on the shrinking tab behavior. If you prefer being able to see all your tabs simultaneously, no matter how small they get, and find the scrolling arrows annoying or visually intrusive, you should turn this feature off and revert to the classic shrinking behavior.
How to Turn Off Scrollable Tabs
You can revert to shrinking tabs via the experimental flags menu.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser.
- Type
chrome://flagsand press Enter. - A page titled “Experiments” will load.
- In the search bar at the top, type Scrollable TabStrip (or simply “Scrollable”).
- The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it is a dropdown menu.
- Change the dropdown menu setting from “Default” or “Enabled” to Disabled.
- Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.
Upon restarting, Chrome will remove the horizontal scrolling arrows. No matter how many tabs you open, they will squash together to remain visible on the screen simultaneously, exactly as they did in older versions of the browser.