If you are someone who keeps twenty or thirty tabs open in Google Chrome simultaneously, the top of your browser window quickly becomes a cramped, unreadable mess. As more tabs open, Chrome shrinks them down until you can no longer even read the title of the website, making it incredibly difficult to find the important tabs you actually need (like your email or a music player).
To solve this, Google Chrome includes a feature called “Pinning.” Pinning a tab permanently locks it to the far-left side of your browser, shrinks it down to just a tiny square icon, and prevents you from accidentally closing it.
How to Pin a Tab
You can pin any active tab in just two clicks.
- Open Google Chrome and navigate to a website you want to keep permanently accessible (for example, Gmail or Spotify).
- Hover your mouse cursor over the tab at the very top of the window.
- Right-click directly on the tab itself.
- A drop-down menu will appear. Click on Pin.
The tab will instantly fly to the absolute far-left edge of the browser window. The text title will vanish, and the tab will shrink down to a small square displaying only the website’s logo (the favicon).
Notice that the small ‘X’ button used to close the tab has also been removed. This makes it virtually impossible to accidentally close your email while you are hurriedly closing other tabs.
The Benefits of Pinned Tabs
Pinned tabs are incredibly powerful for workflow organization.
First, they save a massive amount of horizontal space. You can pin five different web applications (Email, Calendar, Slack, WhatsApp, and Spotify) into the same amount of space normally consumed by a single regular tab.
Second, pinned tabs are permanent. If you close Google Chrome completely and restart your computer, the next time you launch the browser, all your pinned tabs will automatically load and be waiting for you in the exact same spot on the left side of the window.
How to Unpin or Close a Tab
Because the ‘X’ button is removed, you cannot close a pinned tab normally.
If you no longer need the tab permanently docked, you must manually unpin it.
- Right-click the small, square pinned tab on the left side of your browser.
- Click on Unpin from the drop-down menu.
The tab will instantly expand back to its normal, full-width size, and the ‘X’ button will reappear, allowing you to close it normally.