If you usually have a large number of tabs open in Google Chrome, then you would like the Pin tab feature available in Chrome. This feature allows you to reduce the size of a tab to just the size of a favicon. A favicon is a very small icon that is shown next to a website’s name or title on each tab. For example, the favicon for Help Desk Geek is a small version of the picture in the heading of our site.
To pin a tab in Chrome, right-click on the tab you want to pin and select Pin tab from the popup menu.
The tab shrinks to the size of the favicon and is moved to the left side of the tab bar, if it is not already the left-most tab.
If you don’t want a tab to be pinned anymore, right-click on that tab and select Unpin tab from the popup menu. The tab returns to full size, but it stays in the position to where it was moved when you pinned it. It does not move back to its original position.
Pinned tabs in Chrome are now permanent. If you close Chrome and reopen it, the tabs you pinned the last time the program was open remain pinned and display on the left side of the tab bar. This is useful if you want to automatically have access to certain sites every time you open Chrome.
Pinning a tab also prevents you from accidentally closing the tab. When you pin a tab, the X button for closing the tab goes away. The only way to close a pinned tab is to right-click on the tab and select Close tab from the popup menu or to press Ctrl + W. This is useful if you are waiting for a video or other file to stream on a tab and you don’t want to accidentally close the tab and have to restart the streaming process.
You can also use pinned tabs to store web pages for reading later. If you are interrupted while doing some research, and you don’t necessarily want to bookmark the pages you found, you can pin the tabs you were viewing so you can easily return to them later.
by Lori Kaufman