Microsoft Edge Chromium has shipped a steady stream of productivity features that quietly transform daily work — vertical tabs, sleeping tabs, workspaces — but they often don’t surface to enterprise users until an admin enables them. Tab Groups in MS Edge Chromium is the example I keep coming back to: a tiny UX change that helps research-heavy users keep their browsing sessions sane. This post shows how to enable Tab Groups in MS Edge Chromium (and the related grouping behaviour) for the entire fleet through Microsoft Intune, with the recommended baseline and how to scope it per user group.
Tab groups are a useful feature in the Edge browser that I have become very accustomed to and that makes my work much easier. Note: this guide is from 2021 and Tab Groups in MS Edge Chromium are now a standard feature, so these flag steps may no longer be necessary. Originally, this feature was not yet active by default and was located in the experimental features of the Edge browser. In this blog I explain how you can activate this feature.
Table of contents
How to enable Tab Groups in MS Edge Chromium via flags
- Enter the following in the address bar of the browser:
edge://flags
- Enter Tab group in the search field
- Enable Tab Groups and Tab Groups Auto Create
- Restart the Edge Browser
Now when you open tabs from a web page they are automatically grouped into groups. You have the possibility to name these groups or assign a color to them. For the full feature reference, see the official Microsoft Edge policy documentation on Microsoft Learn.
You can also create these groups yourself. If you want to push this configuration broadly, pair it with my walkthrough on managing devices with Microsoft Intune.
Stay healthy, Cheers
Jannik
Edge productivity policies I deploy alongside Tab Groups
Tab Groups land best when paired with a few complementary Edge policies I roll out across managed devices. First, I enable vertical tabs by default via VerticalTabsAllowed, which gives users a wider title area and pairs naturally with grouped tabs on ultrawide monitors. Next, I tune sleeping tabs with a 15-minute threshold to claw back RAM on shared workstations without breaking active research sessions.
Workspace settings are synced to the user’s Entra ID profile so collaborative tab sets follow them across devices, and I encourage saving and restoring sessions for users who reboot frequently. Quick observation from rollouts: Edge Workspaces is the stronger fit for project-based teamwork, while Tab Groups in MS Edge Chromium still wins for research-heavy users who juggle dozens of personal tabs.
A concrete example helps here. On one helpdesk team I support, agents routinely keep a ticketing portal, a knowledge base, and two or three vendor documentation tabs open at once. Before grouping, those tabs blurred together and people lost time hunting for the right one. After turning on Tab Groups Auto Create and naming a coloured group per active ticket, the average time to switch context dropped noticeably and nobody accidentally closed the wrong tab during a busy shift. That kind of small, measurable win is exactly why I treat this as a baseline policy rather than an optional extra.
Common pitfalls when enabling Tab Groups
A few things trip people up during rollout. The most common is assuming the edge://flags approach will persist for managed devices — it won’t reliably, because flags are per-profile and can reset after major Edge updates. For a fleet, always prefer the supported Intune policy or ADMX template so the setting survives version upgrades. Another pitfall is enabling Tab Groups Auto Create without telling users: people suddenly see their tabs reorganising themselves and assume something broke, so a short heads-up message saves a wave of support tickets.
Why this matters: a browser is the primary workspace for most knowledge workers, and small friction there compounds across every task in the day. Getting Tab Groups, vertical tabs, and sleeping tabs configured once, centrally, removes that friction for the whole organisation instead of leaving each person to discover the settings on their own. Test the policy on a small pilot ring first, confirm it survives an Edge update, then roll it out broadly.