How to Hide Tabs in Chrome (Without Closing Them)

1. Collapse a tab group

1. Right-click the tab and choose Add tab to new group, or drag it into a group you already have.
2. Click the group’s name or colour chip to collapse it. Every tab in the group folds into that chip.

Click the chip again and the tabs come back. This is the closest thing Chrome has to hiding: the tabs stay open, stay loaded, and take up one chip’s width. It works best for sets, less well for one stray tab.

2. Pin the tab

Right-click the tab and choose Pin. The tab shrinks to its icon at the left end of the strip, loses its close button, and stays there across restarts. It is not hidden so much as shrunk, and it is the right move for the two or three tabs you keep open all day: mail, calendar, the board.

3. Move it to another window

Drag the tab out of the strip and drop it on the desktop. It becomes its own window, which you can minimise. Or right-click and choose Move tab to another window. The tab is out of sight and still open, and Chrome’s tab search (Ctrl+Shift+A, Cmd+Shift+A on a Mac) finds it from anywhere.

The catch is the same as with every open tab: it is still loaded, still in your way when you alt-tab, and still gone if Chrome crashes without restoring.

4. Put it in the reading list

Right-click the tab and choose Add tab to reading list, then close the tab. The page waits in the reading list, under the bookmarks button or the side panel, until you open it. This is a true hide: the tab is closed, the page is kept.

It is for pages you will read, not pages you were working in. A form half filled, a search you refined, a document scrolled to the right place: the reading list keeps only the address, so all of that is gone when you come back.

5. Collapse the whole strip

If the goal is to hide the tab bar rather than a tab, Chrome’s vertical tabs can do it: right-click the tab strip, choose Show tabs vertically, then drag the strip’s edge in until it collapses to icons. Full-screen mode (F11, or Ctrl+Cmd+F on a Mac) hides the strip entirely until you leave it. There is a walkthrough in Chrome vertical tabs.

6. Snooze it until a time you choose

The thing none of the above does is bring the tab back on its own. A collapsed group is still there to ignore; a reading-list entry waits until you remember it. Snoozing is the other way round: the tab closes now and reopens at a time you set.

Nest, a free tab manager for Chrome, has it in the Snooze tab:

1. Open Nest on the tab you want to hide.
2. In Snooze, pick a time: for 1 hour, for 4 hours, until tonight, until tomorrow morning, until Monday morning, or a number of hours or days you type in.
3. The tab closes. At that time it opens again.

A few details that matter:

• It survives a restart. The wake-up is a Chrome alarm, so a tab snoozed until Monday opens on Monday even if the computer slept or Chrome was closed in between.
• You can snooze a whole Category. In Organize, each Category has a Snooze button that closes every tab in it until a time you pick, which is the fastest way to clear a project off the strip for the weekend.
• Snoozed tabs are listed. The Snooze tab shows what is sleeping and when it wakes, with Wake now on each, so nothing is hidden from you, only from the strip.
• It is free. Snooze needs no account and no Pro.

More in tab snoozing in Nest.

Which one to use

• A set of tabs you are switching between today: collapse a group.
• Two or three tabs you keep all day: pin them.
• A page to read sometime: the reading list.
• A tab you want back at a known time, with the page as you left it: snooze it.
• The tab bar itself: vertical tabs, collapsed, or full screen.

And if you hid a tab by closing it: how to reopen closed tabs in Chrome.