How to Select Multiple Tabs in Chrome at Once

Most people close, move, and organize Chrome tabs one at a time — right-click, choose an action, repeat for the next tab. Chrome has supported acting on several tabs at once for years, but the two clicks that unlock it (Ctrl-click and Shift-click) aren't hinted at anywhere in the interface. Once you know them, a dozen tabs stop being a dozen separate chores.

Select specific tabs: Ctrl-click

Hold Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) and click any tab to add it to a selection, without disturbing the tabs already selected. Click a second, unrelated tab the same way, and now both are highlighted together — a light gray background replaces the normal tab color on each one. Keep Ctrl-clicking to keep adding tabs, or Ctrl-click an already-selected tab again to remove just that one from the selection.

This is the move for a scattered set of tabs — three tabs out of fifteen, none of them next to each other in the strip.

Select a range: Shift-click

Click one tab to make it active, then hold Shift and click a tab further down the strip — every tab between the two, inclusive, highlights as one contiguous selection. This is faster than Ctrl-clicking one by one whenever the tabs you want happen to sit next to each other, which is often, since related tabs tend to get opened in a run.

You can combine both: Shift-click a range, then Ctrl-click a few extra tabs outside it to add them to the same selection.

Select everything: right-click → "Select all tabs"

Right-click any tab and choose Select all tabs, and every tab in the current window highlights at once — no clicking through them individually. This is the fastest path when the bulk action you want (bookmark everything, move the whole window's worth of tabs somewhere else) applies to the entire tab strip rather than a subset of it.

What you can actually do with a selection

Once tabs are highlighted, right-click any one of them — the context menu that appears acts on the whole selection, not just the tab you clicked:

• Close every selected tab in one action, instead of clicking each X.
• Mute or unmute all of them together, useful for silencing several media tabs at once.
• Pin or unpin the whole selection in one step.
• Move tabs to a new window, carrying every highlighted tab over together — see How to Move Tabs Between Chrome Windows for the rest of that workflow.
• Add tabs to a group, folding the whole selection into an existing or brand-new tab group in one move — see How to Use Tab Groups in Chrome for what happens next.
• Bookmark tabs, saving every selected tab into one bookmark folder instead of bookmarking them one at a time.

The pattern underneath all of it: select first, decide the action second, and the action lands on everything you selected — not on a single tab.

The mistake that undoes a selection

Clicking a tab without holding Ctrl or Shift collapses the selection back down to that one tab — Chrome treats a plain click as "start over from here," not "add this too." If a selection you built with several careful Ctrl-clicks vanishes down to one highlighted tab, a stray plain click on the tab strip is almost always why. Rebuild it the same way: Ctrl-click each tab again, or Shift-click from the first one to the last.

Selecting isn't the same as saving

A multi-tab selection is powerful for organizing what's currently open, but it's still scoped to right now, in this window. Close Chrome, restart your machine, or just forget which fifteen tabs you'd grouped together last week, and the selection itself has nothing left to reconstruct from.

Amazing Tabs picks up right where selecting leaves off:

• Save your whole selection in one click, turning "the six tabs I just Ctrl-clicked together" into a named, searchable space instead of a highlight that disappears the moment you click elsewhere.
• Search by title or content with ⌘K / Ctrl+K to find any of them again later, instead of re-selecting from scratch.
• Free for up to 100 saved links, so trying it on your next batch of selected tabs costs nothing.

Select, then save for real. Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free, no signup to install.

Quick recap

• Ctrl-click (Cmd-click on Mac) adds or removes individual tabs from a selection.
• Shift-click selects a contiguous range between two tabs.
• Right-click → "Select all tabs" highlights everything in the current window at once.
• Right-click a selection to close, mute, pin, move, group, or bookmark every highlighted tab together.
• A plain click resets the selection to just that one tab — rebuild it if it disappears unexpectedly.

Further reading: How to Move Tabs Between Chrome Windows for what happens after you move a selection, How to Merge Two Chrome Windows Into One for applying a full-window selection to merging rather than a single move, How to Organize Chrome Tabs by Project for turning a selection into lasting structure, or How to Close All Tabs Except One in Chrome if bulk-closing is the specific job you're after.

Add Amazing Tabs to Chrome — free → Install from the Chrome Web Store. 100 saved links free, upgrade only if you want unlimited and cross-device sync. See pricing for the full breakdown — including the $99 lifetime deal (capped at 200 spots).