Sunday, July 15, 2012

Chrome Tab Sync

Chrome is continuing to grow on me.

Version 19 introduced the capability of syncing tabs across browser instances. The Chrome blog made it sound like it would just happen magically. Not so much, at least for me. In May 2012 the blog said "the tab sync feature will be rolled out more gradually over the coming weeks."

So I waited. And waited.

After more than a month I started Googling to see if I could find when I was going to get it. I was already signing in to Chrome but with my Google Hosted Apps account. Sometimes new things get pushed to Google Hosted Apps accounts slower, e.g. Google+.

What I found was that I was not the only one not seeing Tab Sync.

The solution recommended was to go to chrome://flags. Scroll down in this list until you see "Enable syncing open tabs."


Click on the "Enable" link and restart Chrome.

Now go to the wrench icon in the top right and choose "Settings." Click on "Advanced sync settings..."

The pop-up will look like this:


Check "Open Tabs" and click on "OK."

You will need to do this on every instance of Chrome.

Now when you open a new tab in Chrome down at the bottom will be a link "Other devices." Click on this and you'll get all the open tabs on all the open instances of Chrome by machine name, i.e. T420S in this example.


If that isn't cool enough Tab Sync also works on Chrome for Android and iOS.

1 comment:

Dinsan said...

This feature is one of the most used on Chrome.. things make more sense we have a tablet or a phone and a computer or two... its awesome !