Chrome for Android Now Lets You Pin Tabs

Chrome for Android now supports the “pinned tabs” feature. I first reported this on June 3 based on a Chromium Gerrit entry, when it was still in testing. It is now available by default in Chrome Beta and works in the same way as pinning tabs on desktop. The feature helps you keep important tabs fixed so they do not get lost when switching between pages.

How to pin and unpin tabs in Chrome on Android

To pin a tab in Chrome on Android, open a tab and visit any website. Tap the three-dot menu in the top right corner and select “Pin tab”. The tab moves to the left side of the tab grid and shows a pin icon.

In the tab grid, normal tabs show a close icon. Pinned tabs show a pin icon instead. To close a pinned tab from the grid, long-press the pinned tab and select “Close tab”.

To unpin a tab, tap the menu again and select “Unpin tab”.

You can also access the option from the tab switcher. Tap the tab counter, long-press a tab card and select Pin or Unpin from the menu.

You can also turn on the feature using a flag in Canary and other Chrome versions where it is not active by default.

Open chrome://flags, search for Android pinned tabs, enable it and restart Chrome.

The flag description says it adds the ability to pin tabs through options like context menus and overflow menu items.

You can pin more than one tab in Chrome on Android. Each pinned tab appears on the left side of the tab grid with a pin icon. The pinned tabs stay in place even after you close and reopen Chrome. The feature is live in Chrome Beta at the moment, and Google is likely to bring it to the stable version next.

That’s not all. Chrome is redesigning the Autofill and Passwords settings in favor of a new Your Saved Info section that includes travel and identity documents. It also lets you send PDFs from the built-in PDF Viewer directly to Google Drive without needing to download them first.