How to Disable Google Chrome’s Tab Hover Cards

Tab Hover Cards in Google Chrome help you discern tabs from one another when you have numerous pages open. The feature is enabled by default, but if you don’t like it, the pop-up card can easily be disabled using a Chrome flag.

Starting with Chrome 78, Tab Hover Cards will appear when you rest the mouse cursor over a tab. The hovercard is essentially a larger preview box that now shows the title and URL of the page.

If you want an image preview of the page within the Tab Hover Card, there’s a “Tab Hover Card Images” flag you can enable.

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To disable the cards when you mouse-over a tab, you have to use an experimental flag in Chrome. When you enable/disable anything from chrome://flags, you use unfinished features that haven’t been tested on all devices and can sometimes misbehave. You’ll potentially run into a few bugs, so be careful when you play around with some of the available flags.

To get started, fire up Chrome, type chrome://flags into the Omnibox, press the “Enter” key, and then type “Tab Hover Cards” in the search bar.

Alternatively, you can paste chrome://flags/#tab-hover-cards  into the Omnibox, and then press the “Enter” key to go directly to the flag.

Next, click the drop-down box next to the “Tab Hover Cards” flag and then select the “Disabled” option.

For changes to take effect, you must restart Chrome. Click the blue “Relaunch Now” button at the bottom of the page.

With that, after the web browser restarts, Tab Hover Cards are no longer a part of Google Chrome. If you want to re-enable the feature, just head back to the flag and set it back to the “Default” option.