Managing Multiple Projects in Chrome: The Tab Groups System That Actually Works

The Multi-Project Browser Problem

Running multiple projects simultaneously is normal for freelancers, project managers, and anyone with a portfolio of responsibilities. What's less normal — though just as common — is having a browser that reflects that reality in any coherent way. Most people end up with a single undifferentiated mass of tabs: client A's Figma mockup next to client B's analytics dashboard next to their personal blog's CMS next to a random recipe they opened at lunch.

This isn't laziness. It's the natural result of how browsers work. Tabs accumulate sequentially, driven by where your attention went, not by any organizational principle. By the time you have 35 tabs open across three projects, the tab strip is illegible (every tab is an unreadable favicon) and switching projects means scanning through a sea of icons trying to remember which cluster belongs to which client.

The hidden cost is significant. When you switch from client A's work to client B's, you don't just switch tasks — you have to mentally reconstruct the context of where you left off with client B. What were you doing? What's pending? What tabs do you need? If those tabs are buried in the sea of mixed-project tabs, reconstruction takes 5-10 minutes every time. Multiply that by 4-6 context switches per day, and you're losing 20-60 minutes daily to pure reorientation overhead.

The solution isn't a completely new browser — it's using the organizational tools Chrome already provides in a systematic way, combined with reliable session saving so the organization persists across restarts.

Chrome Profiles vs. Tab Groups: Understanding the Difference

Before diving into the tab group system, it's worth being clear about when to use Chrome profiles versus tab groups, because conflating them leads to over-engineering the setup.

Chrome profiles are separate browser instances with their own cookies, history, saved passwords, extensions, and Chrome sync accounts. They're the right tool for separating fundamentally different identities: your work account from your personal account, or your agency's Google account from your own. If you need to be logged into Gmail as two different users simultaneously — one for a client, one for yourself — that requires two profiles.

Tab groups are organizational labels within a single profile. They let you visually separate and name clusters of tabs, collapse them when not in use, and (with an extension) save and restore them. They're the right tool for separating projects within a single identity context.

The practical implication: if you're a freelancer who always logs into client tools using your own Google account, you probably only need one profile and can manage all your client projects with tab groups. If you have clients who need you to log in as a user on their domain (e.g., their Google Workspace), you'll want a separate Chrome profile per client — and then tab groups within each profile to organize the work for that client.

Most people need one or two profiles at most. Tab groups do the heavy lifting within each profile.

Building Your Project Workspace System

Here's a concrete system for freelancers and project managers managing 3-8 active projects. The goal is a setup that takes 30 minutes to configure, 5 minutes per week to maintain, and saves that time back tenfold.

Step 1: Define your project inventory. List every active project or client. Include internal projects and side work. This is the list you're organizing around. If a project hasn't had activity in the last three weeks, consider archiving it — active lists should stay short enough to be scannable.

Step 2: Identify your "base tabs" per project. For each project, what are the 3-6 tabs you always need? For a client website project, this might be: the client's CMS admin, their Google Analytics, your project management tool filtered to that client, and the Figma file. These base tabs are the skeleton of your workspace — always open, always relevant.

Step 3: Create and name your groups. In Chrome, right-click any tab and select "Add tab to new group." Name the group after the client or project. Use short, consistent naming — "acme", "river-co", "personal-site". Color-code them if that helps you scan faster; Chrome gives you 8 color options. Put the base tabs into their respective groups.

Step 4: Save each group immediately. Using TabGroup Vault, save each group as soon as it's set up. This is your clean baseline. If anything goes wrong — Chrome crashes, you accidentally close a group — you can restore this baseline in seconds.

Step 5: Establish a daily checkpoint habit. At the end of each workday, spend 30 seconds saving your current group states. This captures whatever additional tabs you've opened during the day on top of your base tabs. The next morning, you restore and start exactly where you stopped.

Naming Conventions That Scale

Naming tab groups consistently sounds like a minor detail, but it becomes important once you have 20 or 30 saved group configurations. The groups in your saved library need to be identifiable at a glance, which means the naming scheme needs to carry enough information without being verbose.

A three-part naming convention works well for most multi-project setups:

• Client/project identifier: Short, unambiguous. "acme", "riverton", "blog". Not "Acme Corp Website Redesign Project" — just "acme".
• Work type (optional): "acme-dev", "acme-analytics", "acme-comms" — useful when a single client generates multiple distinct work contexts.
• Status (for saved snapshots): "acme [active]", "acme [onhold]", "acme [complete]". A status tag in your saved snapshots means you can tell what's current without opening each one.

Keep the identifiers short enough to read in the collapsed tab group chip in your tab bar. Long names get truncated and lose their value. Four to eight characters is the practical limit for what reads well in the Chrome UI.

Handling Project Transitions and Handoffs

Projects end. New ones start. The system needs to handle transitions gracefully, not accumulate zombie groups for projects that finished six months ago.

When a project completes, do a "project closeout" on your browser workspace: save the final state of the group (useful if the project comes back or if there's a follow-on engagement), then close and delete the active group. This keeps your active workspace lean and your saved library meaningful.

When a project is paused — on hold, waiting for client feedback, in a quiet phase — collapse the group and leave it as a saved state, but remove it from your active browser session. When the project re-activates, restore the saved state. This is the equivalent of putting a file in the cabinet rather than leaving it on your desk.

For project handoffs — when you're handing a project to a colleague or a new team member — your saved tab group is actually a useful artifact. Exporting the group as a URL list gives the incoming person a starting point for the browser resources they'll need. It's not a full project handoff document, but it's a meaningful supplement to one.

The Weekly Workspace Review

The system requires light maintenance to stay useful. A five-minute weekly review keeps it from drifting back into chaos. Here's what to cover:

• Prune closed projects. Is there a group still open for a project that wrapped up last week? Archive and close it.
• Trim base tabs. Did a resource URL change? Did you add a tool to a project that should now be in the base tabs? Update the group and re-save your baseline.
• Check for orphan tabs. Are there ungrouped tabs in your tab strip that actually belong to a project? Add them to the relevant group or close them.
• Review saved snapshots. Are there old snapshots in your saved library that are no longer useful? Delete them. A cluttered saved library is almost as bad as a cluttered tab strip.

Five minutes, once a week. The system pays you back 30+ minutes per week in eliminated reorientation time, and it prevents the gradual entropy that eventually makes most organizational systems collapse under their own weight.

Side Projects and Personal Tabs

A question that comes up consistently: where do personal tabs go in a work-focused group system? The answer depends on whether you use separate Chrome profiles for work and personal browsing.

If you use one profile for everything (common for freelancers who work from personal machines), create a "personal" group alongside your client groups. Shopping, reading, personal project research — it all goes there. The group functions as a boundary between work and personal context, even when they live in the same browser window.

Side projects get their own group, treated the same as client projects. Your personal blog, a side business, an open source project — if it generates recurring browser context (a CMS, analytics, a GitHub repo), it deserves a named group. The system doesn't care whether the project makes money; it just cares whether you need to re-enter a context reliably.

The one thing to avoid is letting "personal" become a catch-all for everything that doesn't fit neatly elsewhere. A group named "misc" or "other" is organizational debt — it grows without limit and becomes just as unmanageable as an ungrouped tab strip. If something doesn't have a natural home, either create a group for it or close the tab.