Chrome Finally Stole Vertical Tabs From Edge — 6 Years Late and Right-Click Away
Chrome Finally Stole Vertical Tabs From Edge — 6 Years Late and Right-Click AwayGoogle just admitted your horizontal tabs were a mess. The fix? Copy what Edge did in 2020.
Chrome now supports vertical tabs and a fullscreen reading mode — rolling out to all desktop users starting April 7, 2026.
Edge had this in 2020. Firefox had it via extensions for a decade. Arc made it cool. Google finally showed up to its own party.
🧩 Dumb Mode Dictionary
| Term | Translation |
|---|---|
| Vertical tabs | Tabs on the side of the window instead of the top. Like a sidebar menu for your 47 open pages. |
| Immersive reading mode | Strips out every ad, popup, and newsletter beg from a webpage. Just the text. |
| Tab groups | Color-coded folders for your tabs. Still works with vertical layout. |
| Arc browser | The trendy browser that popularized vertical tabs before getting acqui-killed into Dia. |
| Binned feature | A feature every competitor shipped years ago that Google finally added after losing users. |
📖 What Actually Changed
Two features dropped on April 7, 2026 for Chrome desktop:
- Vertical tabs: Right-click any Chrome window → “Show Tabs Vertically.” Tabs move to the left sidebar. You can collapse or expand the panel. Tab groups still work. No hard limit on tab count.
- Immersive reading mode: Right-click any page → “Open in reading mode.” Full-page text view. No ads, no images, no newsletter popups. Also accessible from the address bar.
Both persist across sessions once enabled. That’s it. No flags, no extensions, no chrome://experiments nonsense.
⏳ Why It Took Google 6 Years
Between you and me, Google didn’t want to validate Edge’s best feature.
- Microsoft Edge launched vertical tabs in March 2021
- Vivaldi had them in 2019
- Firefox users ran Tree Style Tab extensions since roughly 2010
- Arc browser made vertical-first the default in 2022 and got millions of users
- Arc dies → becomes Dia → Google suddenly announces vertical tabs
The play here is obvious. Arc proved the demand. Arc died. Google absorbed the lesson without having to credit anyone. Classic.
📊 Browser Tab Wars — Feature Timeline
| Feature | Edge | Firefox (ext) | Arc | Chrome |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vertical tabs | 2021 | ~2010 | 2022 | 2026 |
| Split view | 2024 | N/A | 2022 | Feb 2026 |
| Reading mode | 2023 | 2015 | 2023 | Apr 2026 |
| Tab groups | 2021 | 2020 | 2022 | 2020 |
| PDF markup | 2018 | 2019 | N/A | Feb 2026 |
Chrome is last on almost everything. But it has 65% market share, so it doesn’t matter. That’s the actual lesson here.
🗣️ What People Are Saying
- Edge users: “Welcome to 2021, Chrome.”
- Arc refugees: “Cool, now do the split view thing where I can pin two sites side by side.”
- Reddit r/chrome: Mostly celebrating, with some users pointing out that the sidebar eats horizontal screen space on smaller monitors
- Google’s Alex Tsu (blog post author): “Designed to streamline your browser and help you maximize productivity”
- The real vibe: Nobody’s switching back to Chrome for this. But nobody who stayed is leaving either.
🔍 The Hidden Reading Mode Angle
Here’s what most people are missing. The reading mode isn’t just a cosmetic upgrade — it’s a content extraction tool.
Right-click → “Open in reading mode” → you get a clean, text-only version of any page. No paywall CSS tricks. No newsletter overlay. No cookie consent banner.
Does it bypass actual paywalls? No. But it strips every layer of visual garbage that publishers stack on top of free content to make you think you need to subscribe. On news sites running soft paywalls (the ones that show you the article then blur it), reading mode sometimes pulls the full text before the blur script fires.
Not guaranteed. But worth testing on every site you hit.
Cool. Google copied everyone’s homework on tabs… Now What the Hell Do We Do? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
🔧 Build a Chrome Extension That Themes Vertical Tabs
Google’s vertical tab sidebar ships with default styling. No custom colors, no icons, no width control. That’s your opening.
There are already 40+ tab management extensions on the Chrome Web Store, but none of them are optimized for the new native vertical tab layout yet. Build a simple extension that lets users customize the sidebar width, add favicons-only mode, or auto-collapse when screen width drops below a threshold.
Here’s what you do: fork an existing tab styler, adapt it for the new vertical DOM elements, price it at $2.99/year, and put it on Product Hunt within the week.
Example: A developer in Lisbon built a tab-color-coding extension for Edge’s vertical tabs in 2022 → 28,000 installs in six months → $800/month from the Pro tier that added workspace profiles.
Timeline: Extension live in 1 week → first 1,000 users within 30 days if you ride the launch news cycle
💰 Sell 'Chrome Productivity Setup' Guides on Gumroad
Every time a major browser feature drops, there’s a wave of people who don’t know how to set it up properly. Vertical tabs + reading mode + tab groups + split view (from February) = a full productivity workflow that 90% of Chrome users don’t know exists.
Package it. Screen recordings, keyboard shortcuts, workspace templates. Sell it for $7 on Gumroad. Target the “digital minimalism” and “clean desk setup” crowds on Twitter and TikTok.
Example: A content creator in Manila made a $5 “Arc Browser Setup Guide” PDF in 2023 when Arc was hot → sold 3,400 copies in 4 months → $17K from a PDF about a free browser.
📱 Use Reading Mode + Automation for Content Curation Newsletters
Chrome’s reading mode strips pages to clean text. That clean text pipes nicely into automation tools.
Here’s the play: set up a Puppeteer script that opens URLs in reading mode, extracts the clean text, feeds it into an LLM for summarization, and dumps the output into a newsletter template. You now have a semi-automated content curation newsletter.
Pick a niche — SaaS news, crypto regulation updates, AI research papers. Charge $8/month on Substack or Beehiiv. The reading mode extraction means you spend less time cleaning HTML garbage.
Example: A freelancer in Nairobi built a “Kenya Tech Weekly” newsletter using browser automation + GPT summaries → 4,200 subscribers in 8 months → $2,100/month from a paid tier that adds deal analysis.
🎓 Create YouTube Content: 'Chrome Just Changed — Here's What You Missed'
Browser update videos consistently pull 100K+ views because Chrome has 3.5 billion users and most of them don’t read changelogs.
The formula: screen recording, before/after comparison, “3 hidden features you missed” angle. Vertical tabs, reading mode, split view, PDF markup — bundle the last 3 months of Chrome updates into one 8-minute video.
Optimize the thumbnail for “NEW CHROME UPDATE 2026” and publish within 48 hours of the news cycle.
Example: A tech YouTuber in Bogota makes browser comparison videos in Spanish → averages 180K views per Chrome update video → pulls $600-900/video from AdSense + $300 from NordVPN sponsorship reads.
⚙️ Build a Vertical Tab Workspace Manager for Teams
Here’s the sleeper angle nobody’s talking about. Vertical tabs make workspace management visible. You can now see 30+ tab titles at once. That means teams can standardize browser layouts.
Build a Chrome extension that lets managers define “workspace templates” — preloaded tab groups for specific roles. Sales team gets CRM + email + LinkedIn. Dev team gets GitHub + Jira + docs. Click one button, vertical tabs populate with the right layout.
Charge $5/seat/month to companies. Target IT managers on LinkedIn.
Example: A two-person team in Tallinn built a workspace tab extension for Edge → landed 12 B2B contracts with Estonian startups within a year → $3,400/month recurring from 680 seats.
🛠️ Follow-Up Actions
| Step | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 | Enable vertical tabs now: right-click Chrome window → “Show Tabs Vertically” |
| 2 | Test reading mode on every paywalled site you regularly visit |
| 3 | Check Chrome Web Store for gaps in vertical tab customization extensions |
| 4 | Set up a Puppeteer + reading mode content pipeline if you run a newsletter |
| 5 | If you make YouTube content, film a Chrome update video within 48 hours |
Quick Hits
| Want to… | Do this |
|---|---|
 Enable vertical tabs |
Right-click Chrome → “Show Tabs Vertically” |
 Strip ads from articles |
Right-click page → “Open in reading mode” |
| Get clean text for automation |
Use reading mode DOM as extraction source via Puppeteer |
 Make money from this |
Build a tab-theming extension or Chrome productivity guide |
| Stay ahead |
Watch for Chrome’s next move — they’ll copy Arc’s split-tab workspaces next |
Google spent 6 years watching Edge users enjoy vertical tabs — then shipped it in a right-click menu like they invented it.
!