How to move multiple tabs to a new window in Chrome

You probably already know that you can move individual Chrome tabs to a new window by dragging them out of the browser window. And if you’re like most Chrome surfers, you’ll have somewhere between 10 and 11 tabs open at any given moment (Patrick Dubroy has a well written post explaining the number of tabs most people have open) .

Some people are avid tab advocates and will have dozens open at once, while others can get by with just a few; however, both users will appreciate a little known Chrome feature that lets you move many tabs as one group.

The nice thing about this trick is that you don’t need to download any Chrome extensions because moving multiple tabs is an innate Chrome feature.

Here’s how it works:

1. Open Chrome and click the first tab.
2. Press and hold down the Ctrl key
3. Click the additional tabs to move
4. Release Ctrl
5. Drag the selection outside the browser

A new window will automatically appear that comprises the selected tabs.

A few things to note:

• While clicking additional tabs it isn’t immediately obvious they your tabs are selected because the selection color is very subtle, especially in the default Chrome theme.  Don’t let this throw you off; just keep clicking (selecting) your tabs and then release the Ctrl button when you’re done to finalize the group selection.
• If you need to move a myriad of contiguous tabs, just click the first tab and then select the entire range by holding down the Shift key as you click the last tab. In other words, replace the Ctrl key with the Shift key in the above instructions and you’ll grab the whole shebang in one sweep.

Advanced Stuff

If the above tip isn’t geeky enough for you then you’ll be pleased to know you can add an option to select all tabs by domain.

Enter the following command into the Chrome location bar:

chrome://flags/#tab-groups-context-menu

After clicking Enable on Add grouping to tab context menu and restarting the browser you’ll see two new options when you right click a tab:

• Select by domain
• Select by opener

If you click Select by domain then Chrome will group webpages of the same domain name so you can easily drag them into a new window.  So for example, if you have multiple open tabs from Wikipedia, just right click the first tab, choose Select by domain and drag out the browser to move only the wikipedia.org tabs into a new window.

Select by opener selects all tabs that originated from the same source.  For example, say you visited a web page called winyourfreeipad.com which opens a pop-under.  If you right click the sweepstakes tab and choose Select by opener, it’ll select both the winyourfreeipad.com site and the pop-under.