Pinned tabs in Chrome: what they are and how to use them

A pinned tab shrinks down to just its icon and parks itself on the left of your tab strip. It is Chrome's way of saying: this one stays open. Pinned tabs keep your open tabs tidy, much like separators keep your bookmarks bar tidy. Here is how to pin a tab, what pinning actually changes, and how to stop your pins vanishing when you restart.

What is a pinned tab?

When you pin a tab, three things change. It shrinks to a small icon with no title, so it takes up almost no room. It moves to the far left of the tab strip and stays there, ahead of your normal tabs. And it loses its close button, so you cannot shut it by accident. Links that lead to a different site open in a new tab, which keeps the pinned one on its page.

How to pin and unpin a tab

Right click the tab and choose Pin. That is all there is to it. To undo it, right click the pinned tab and choose Unpin, and the tab pops back to full size. You can drag pinned tabs left and right to reorder them among themselves. It works the same way in Chrome, Edge, and Brave, and Firefox has the same feature under Pin Tab.

Why pinned tabs vanish after a restart

This is the part that catches most people out. Chrome only remembers your pinned tabs if it restores your whole session, and with the default setting they are gone the moment you close the last window. Here is how to make pinned tabs reopen on startup:

1. Open Settings. Click the three dots menu in the top right corner of Chrome and select Settings.
2. Click On startup in the left menu.
3. Choose Continue where you left off so your pinned tabs stay active when you close and reopen the browser.

With that on, your pinned tabs come back every time you reopen Chrome. Firefox keeps pinned tabs across restarts without any setup.

Pin it or bookmark it?

Pin the small set of sites you keep open all day: your email, your calendar, your team chat. Bookmark the things you want one click away without keeping them open. That split is exactly why the bookmarks bar fills up so much faster than the tab strip: pins hold three or four sites, and the bar holds everything else. If yours has turned into a wall of icons, see how to organize bookmarks for a tidy setup, and how to use Diviide to mark each group with a separator.

Tips

Keep your pins to a handful. A pinned tab shows only its icon, and five icons are easy to tell apart where ten are not. Pins belong to the window they are in, so if you work across two windows, pin your always open sites in your main one. And if what you really want is to keep a project's tabs together rather than one site always open, tab groups are the better fit. Pins also carry over if you move your tab strip to the side with vertical tabs.

Common questions

Why did my pinned tabs disappear?

Chrome only brings pinned tabs back if it restores your session. Click the three dots menu, select Settings, choose On startup, and pick Continue where you left off. With that on, your pinned tabs survive a restart. Firefox restores pinned tabs on its own.

How many tabs can you pin in Chrome?

There is no hard limit. In practice a handful works best, because a pinned tab shows only its icon and a long row of icons gets hard to tell apart.

Do pinned tabs show on the bookmarks bar?

No. Pinned tabs live in the tab strip at the very top of the window. The bookmarks bar is the separate row below the address bar, and that is where bookmarks and separators live.