If you searched for this expecting the answer to be “you can’t, install something” — that changed. Chrome saves tab groups natively, and it is the first thing to try.
The native way
Right-click the coloured group label in the tab strip and choose Save group.
The group becomes a coloured pill on your bookmarks bar. Close the window, restart the browser, come back next week: click the pill and every tab in the group reopens, with the group’s name and colour intact. Right-click the pill to rename it, ungroup it, or delete it.
If you are signed into Chrome with sync on for tabs and history, saved groups also appear on your other devices, including Android and iOS. That part is real, and it is also the part people report as flaky — if your saved groups are not showing up on a second machine, check Settings → You and Google → Sync and confirm Tabs and history are both included before assuming it is broken.
Edge has its own version of this, and Firefox added tab groups in 2025.
For most people, that is the whole answer. If you save the group and it comes back, you are done and the rest of this post is not for you.
The four things it still does not do
It is worth being precise about where the native feature stops, because those gaps are specific rather than general.
It saves a group, not a window. A working window is usually three or four groups plus a handful of loose tabs. Saving it means saving each group separately and losing the loose ones — and when you restore them you get three pills to click and the arrangement back in pieces.
Only the groups you remembered. This is the real one. Saving is a deliberate act you perform before anything goes wrong, and the window you lose is, almost by definition, the one you had not got round to saving. A safety net you have to remember to deploy is not a safety net.
It lives in a Google account, not in a file. The saved group is Chrome’s, synced through your profile. There is no export, no copy on disk, and nothing that survives moving browsers or a profile going wrong.
It cannot come back on its own. A saved group waits on the bookmarks bar until you click it. That is fine for Reading and useless for the four tabs I need on Monday morning, which is the case where you close them precisely so you do not have to think about them.
When you need more than a pill
Latr covers the four gaps above, and the fourth one is the whole reason it exists.
A whole window, groups and all. One press saves every tab in the window with its grouping — which tabs belonged together, what each group was called, its colour, and whether it was folded. It comes back as a window, not as forty tabs dropped into whatever you are currently looking at.
Copies you did not ask for. Autosave keeps the last few versions of your window as you work, and it can save a window at the moment you close it. So the window you lose is already saved, which is the only version of this feature that helps with the case that actually happens. Name a window and it is held out of that rotation permanently.
Nothing on a server. Saved windows live in your browser’s own storage, with no account involved — a free install of Latr makes no network requests at all. To carry one to another computer, share it as a link and open the link there.
And a group can have a time. From a group’s menu: close it now, and it comes back as a group, on Monday morning, or after the meeting, or in three hours. This is the one thing no session saver and no browser feature does, and it is the difference between a list you have to remember to open and one that opens itself.
Restoring the groups uses the browser’s tab-groups permission, which Latr does not ask for at install — it asks the first time you restore a window that had groups, once. Decline it and the window still comes back, just flat.
The short version
Use Save group for a group you will reach for deliberately. Use something that snapshots whole windows for the pile you would be upset to lose — because the group you lose is the one you never saved, and no amount of discipline fixes that.
