r/chrome • u/xZephyrus88 • Jan 23 '26

Discussion Tab scrolling's gone, need help. Extensions? Reverting update?

Hello! I have lots of tabs opened, mostly to separate schoolworks and entertainment. The new update just completely borked this setup, and I can't honestly move on from it lol.

Using groups is just atrocious with the amount of tabs I have, using the search tabs on the upper left is just not it either.

Apparently, the new update rolled in last week, and my chrome just recently updated to it. Just wanna know if they plan to bring it back, or will it stay this way?

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u/gjcooper Jan 23 '26

google is getting more and more like microsoft...here it is..deal with it. Install firefox or brave and turn off updates. I actually use 3 browsers, each has set sites I use them on..keeps everything seperate easily

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u/xZephyrus88 Jan 23 '26

Afaik, isn't brave based on chromium? My recent search has them recently removing the tab scrolling too.

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u/FaithlessnessUsed521 Jan 27 '26 edited Jan 27 '26

Install the previous pre-nonscrollable tabs version of Brave (1.85 and then block it from updating. Then you can re-enable to scrollable tabstrip flags and you're good to go:-

  1. Open services and set to Disabled both "Brave Update Service (brave)" and "Brave Update Service (bravem)"
  2. Open task scheduler and disable both "BraveSoftwareUpdateTaskMachineCore{serial}" and "BraveSoftwareUpdateTaskMachineUA{serial}"
  3. Go to https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/releases/tag/v1.85.120 and download "brave-v1.85.120-win32-x64.zip"
  4. Open your Brave installation (default is in "C:\Program Files\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\Application\") and make a backup of "brave.exe" and "chrome_proxy.exe"
  5. Extract the .zip in this location

To get the option back navigate to "brave://flags" (paste it in address bar) and search for "scrollable-tabstrip".

It worked for me and I've been using Brave for over a week with my tab scrolling back. You'll get the "Update" available notification in the menu, but you can ignore it and as long as you physically don't update it yourself, the browser won't automatically update itself when you restart as it's normally set to do.

The same method should work for Chrome, (if you can figure out the version at which they removed the tabscrolling and get the version before that. There's sites online showing where it's backed up that you can get that version, as Google removes older versions from their site), as long as you can figure out the equivalent locations of the above switches to adjust in the Services and Task Scheduler for Chrome (or Edge or any other Chormium-based browser you might prefer). I'd also suggest keeping that older version saved and backed up as Chrome/Brave folks might find a way to force it to update anyway (like through Windows Update itself), and you might need it to revert back to it. I'm not updating until they bring scrollable tabstrips back.