Chrome Comes Out With Split View To Help Increase Productivity

Google announced it is introducing Split View in Chrome, a new way to view two tabs at the same time side by side within the same window. After months of testing behind a flag, the feature is gradually becoming available to more users — and in use every day, it feels like a small change that nets outsized productivity gains.

What Split View Does, and Why It Matters

Split View allows you to tile two tabs in the same Chrome window, while maintaining a unified toolbar, bookmarks bar, and extensions drawer. That rids you of the duplicate chrome that results from snapping a window inside your OS, shrinking visual noise and saving a sliver of vertical real estate. It also clarifies those workflows that are continuously bouncing between two webpages — say, writing in a CMS and previewing those copy changes, checking specs on one page against those on another, or confirming data from a spreadsheet.

And that makes sense — Chrome clocks 65% of the desktop browser market share worldwide based on data from StatCounter, and for a massive chunk of the workforce, a native split view is a significant quality-of-life upgrade.

Reducing window swaps can also help reduce context switching, which UC Irvine’s Gloria Mark has tied to a higher cognitive load and longer recovery times following interruptions.

Hands-on workflow gains from Chrome’s Split View feature

It’s a feature that, in practice, takes friction out of routines that had long been fussy. With the live preview pane pinned, writing in WordPress is made super simple. And reading is tidier: just hold a press release or white paper steady on one side and then open up citations on the other without losing your place. For analytics work, associating a dashboard with the source data set or documentation helps mitigate tab roulette.

It does simple comparisons, too. Prices, feature matrices, and code snippets, or even support tickets versus internal notes — everything remains visible. Louisa Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby even when you’re getting the femininity right, because they just don’t do it for us: everything from little distances above the eyes to the middle distance in conversation isn’t revolutionary like drapery, and overall provides a narrower mental bookcase and less back-and-forth. And, although each individual switch may seem small, both Microsoft and Nielsen Norman Group have documented how frequent toggling accumulates attention costs over the course of a day. Split View cuts those micro-frictions.

How to use Split View in Chrome for side-by-side tabs

Once it’s available, right-click a tab and click “New split view with current tab.” Chrome matches that tab with another tab, setting up a two-pane view. A blue Split View control on the toolbar provides speedy actions: reversing panes; closing one side or the other; pushing tabs apart into different windows.

The divider can be dragged to resize the panes, and a default 50/50 split responds fluidly to text-heavy pages or media. You can easily go full screen on a new tab; opening one gets the last split layout back just as quickly. For now, it’s heavily mouse-driven; power users will wish for keyboard shortcuts and template presets in subsequent updates.

Availability and rollout schedule for Chrome Split View

Desktop Chrome is gradually rolling out Split View. If you still don’t see the option in the tab context menu, there’s a chance that you can enable this experiment: open up a new tab, visit chrome://flags, search for “Split View,” and tap to enable the relevant flag — then restart your browser. Like all experimental options, some details could shift between now and a broader release.

How Split View in Chrome compares to rival browsers

Chrome is playing some needed catch-up to tiling-tabbed browsers. There is already a split-screen mode in Microsoft Edge, which lets you put two pages on one window for easy swapping. Vivaldi’s Tab Tiling leads the power-user pack with vertical and horizontal splits, grid layouts, and more than two tiles at a time. Brave also has split views baked in with its sidebar, so side-by-side browsing becomes an integral part of that workflow kit. There isn’t a native equivalent in Firefox today, but experiments such as Side View and extensions give an idea of where it might head.

Chrome’s strength is simplicity and ubiquity. It might not be able to keep up with Vivaldi in terms of configurability, but its philosophy is that of a low-friction and integrated suite, which means something for teams embracing a single browser platform and users who want speed over setup.

Limitations today and what could improve in Split View

Currently, Split View has just two panes with no ability to save layouts, create named workspaces, or specify favorites per site.

• Power users will want keyboard shortcuts, “remembered” tile ratios per domain, and the ability to tile more than two tabs.
• Session sync and more-than-just-split sessions across devices would be useful for hybrid work setups, too.

Bottom line: why Split View matters for Chrome users

Split View is one of those deceptively simple updates that makes Chrome feel faster but doesn’t actually change how you browse. Less window juggling, fewer duplicate UI elements, and a better way to focus on two things at once — it’s the kind of feature that pays off within minutes, not weeks. For those who write or research or analyze all day, that sounds like a new default workflow waiting to happen.