Control Alt Achieve: Pinning Tabs in Chrome

Sunday, December 4, 2022

Pinning Tabs in Chrome

This post is Day 1 of my "12 Days of Chrome-mas" series where we are learning all about the Google Chrome browser including tips, tricks, lesser known features, and helpful ideas. You can access all of the posts in the series at: bit.ly/chromemas22

Two common issues with tabs in Google Chrome are:

Having the tabs take up too much room when you have a lot of them open and
Accidentally closing out of a tab that you meant to keep open

There are certainly several options for addressing these issues, but one simple approach is to pin a tab. Pinning a tab makes the tab much smaller, and it makes it impossible to close the tab if you do not mean to.

See below for a short tutorial video and written directions on how this works.

▶️ Tutorial Video (3 minutes)

Or watch on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDC8AH9fxz8

📌 How to Pin a Tab

So let's say you are at an awesome professional development training and you have a resource document that is filled with links. As you are opening up all of these great resources, you don't want to accidentally close out of the main agenda document. What you can do is pin the tab.

Here's what you do:

Right-click on the tab for the resource document (or whatever tab you want to keep)
Then choose "Pin" from the drop-down menu.

The tab will now be "pinned"!

👍 Benefits of Pinning a Tab

There are several benefits to pinning a tab:

First the tab will be much smaller, just showing the icon for the site. So it will take up less space, which is good.
Second, the "X" to close out the tab has been removed. You can't accidentally close the tab, because there is no "X" to click on.
And third, even if you exit out of Chrome entirely, closing all of your tabs, the next time you open Chrome the pinned tab will still be there.

You can pin as many tabs as you like at one time, and they will all stay safe and sound at the top left side of your browser.

❌ How to Unpin a Tab

When are done having a tab pinned, you can easily unpin it.

Simply right-click on the pinned tab
Then click "Unpin" from the pop-up menu.

Your tab will now be back to normal, and you can move it or close it however you want.

🏁 Conclusion

And that's it! Hopefully this tip will help you manage your important tabs in Chrome.

Be sure to check out the other blog posts and videos in my series on Google Chrome to pick up more tips and helpful ideas here bit.ly/chromemas22