The Cramped Title Bar
If you are a power user who regularly keeps dozens of tabs open in Google Chrome, navigating between them becomes difficult as the tabs shrink in size. To combat this, Google introduced a feature called the “Scrollable Tabstrip.” Instead of tabs shrinking indefinitely until they are just tiny icons, they maintain a minimum width, and Chrome adds left and right arrows to the title bar, allowing you to horizontally scroll through your massive list of tabs. While intended to improve readability, many users find the scrolling arrows annoying, preferring the classic behavior where tabs simply squash together so they are all visible at a glance without needing to scroll.
Restoring the Classic Squashed Tabs
To eliminate the horizontal scrolling arrows and disable the Scrollable Tabstrip feature completely in Google Chrome, you must dive into the browser’s hidden experimental flags menu.
Open a new tab in your Google Chrome browser. Click into the address bar, type exactly chrome://flags, and press Enter to load the experiments page. At the top of this page, you will see a search box. Type Scrollable tabstrip into the search field. The list below will filter down to show the matching experiment flag. Click the dropdown menu located to the right of the “Scrollable tabstrip” flag (which will likely be set to “Default”) and change the setting to Disabled. A blue button labelled Relaunch will appear at the bottom right corner of the window. Click it to restart Chrome. When the browser reopens, the scrolling arrows will be gone, and your tabs will once again compress to fit entirely within the visible width of the window.