nixes merged tabs in dev version of Chrome for Android

BY

Published 6 Apr 2016

NSFW AI Why trust Greenbot

We maintain a strict editorial policy dedicated to factual accuracy, relevance, and impartiality. Our content is written and edited by top industry professionals with first-hand experience. The content undergoes thorough review by experienced editors to guarantee and adherence to the highest standards of reporting and publishing.

Disclosure

Get ready to say farewell to Chrome’s merged tabs feature. The capability is no longer there in the latest build of the developer version of Chrome for Android, which offers a pretty strong gauge that it’s likely to be killed off. 

Introduced in llipop, merged tabs break out individual Chrome pages amongst other apps when you press the Recents (multitasking) button. 

chrome merged tabs

Once you turn off the merge tabs apps feature, your tabs will all appear within Chrome. 

There’s always been a way to turn the feature off, recently Chrome no longer enabled it as the default behavior when launching Chrome for the first time. Now if you launch the latest update to the Chrome Dev version of the browser, you won’t even see the feature available in the settings.

chrome dev settings

The Merge tabs apps option is no longer available.

The story behind the story: uses the Chrome Dev channel to test out new features, which are then sent to the beta channel before going live in the stable build. It looks like the same thing is at work here, but instead it’s a feature removal. probably has numerous metrics that indicate the merge feature is rarely used, so it’s not worth the resources to maintain active development.