Chrome Is Testing a "Notebooks" Feature for Tab Groups With Gemini

Google is working on a new experimental feature called “Notebooks”. It’s now available for testing behind a flag in Chrome Canary. We enabled the flag and looked through the Chromium code behind the change to see what’s there.

The feature flag, #notebooks, is available in Chrome Canary on Windows, macOS, Linux, and ChromeOS. It’s disabled by default, so nothing is user-facing to try yet. Its description is simple: “Enables Notebooks.”

Built on Tab Groups

The Notebooks prototype commit spotted by Windows Report builds Notebooks around Chrome’s existing tab groups rather than introducing a completely separate feature. In the current prototype, a tab group is treated as a Notebook when its first tab is designated as the group’s Notebook Home.

Notebook Home is more than just a label. Enabling the feature creates a new tab at the beginning of the group that serves as the Notebook Home.

Instead of simply collapsing the group, clicking its header takes users back to Notebook Home.

Google has also added logic to keep Notebook Home attached to its group during actions such as dragging tabs or selecting multiple tabs, along with browser tests covering those behaviors.

Gemini is the entry point

The way users enable the feature is through a new option in the tab group’s menu labeled “Enhance with Gemini.” That’s the exact text users would see.

Chromium describes this menu item as the control for toggling Notebook Home, directly tying Gemini to the Notebook experience. Selecting it creates a Notebook Home tab at the beginning of the group. Selecting it again removes the tab and restores the group to its normal state.

The prototype also treats Notebook Home differently from ordinary tabs. It receives special handling instead of a standard tab view, suggesting it’s meant to work as a dedicated Notebook page, not a normal website.

What’s still missing?

Enabling the flag still doesn’t expose a finished Notebook experience, so the feature clearly remains under development.

There’s no finished interface yet, and Gemini’s exact role inside Notebook hasn’t been shown. What’s already there tells us Google is building this into tab groups deliberately, not just testing the idea, complete with a dedicated Notebook Home and an “Enhance with Gemini” entry point.