Google Developer Says Chrome Team is Working on a Scrollable Tabstrip For the Browser (techdows.com)

If you're a tab-hoarder, and you use Chrome browser, Google may have some news for you soon. The company is working on a scrollable tabstrip to make it easier for users to navigate through tabs, a developer was quoted as saying. Peter Casting, who works on Chrome UI, said, "scrollable tabstrip is in the works. In the meantime, try shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking to select multiple tabs at once, then drag out to separate Windows to group tabs by Window." TechDows, which first reported the development: We're expecting this as the related bug, the 'UI: tab overflow' bug created 10 years back, reports opening too many tabs causes add tab button (+) to disappear and tabs do not scroll then, the expected result has been mentioned as 'scrollable tabs.' Further reading: Google is raiding Firefox for Chrome's next UI features.

Comments

Work on memory usage

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually run out of memory before I run out of room for tabs.

Re: Work on memory usage

[Anonymous Coward]

They already added an easy fix for this: the close button.

Don't keep all your tabs open. If you want to come back to a page later, bookmark it and close the tab.

Re: Work on memory usage

[helllllllloooo]

Oh, look! The common sense meter just went to 11.

Re: Work on memory usage

[Joce640k]

I'll get right on it, right after you paypal me the money for the upgrade.

Like the vertical tab strip?

[Anonymous Coward]

They made and then discontinued a few months later...?

Re: Like the vertical tab strip?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why I still use Firefox/Waterfox. The answer is simple with our wide-screen monitors: vertical tab support. Just re-enable it (but better) from what you used to have.

But noooo reusing old code doesn't get some engineer/manager promoted. Gotta invent something new. Smh...

Innovators

[Anonymous Coward]

Between this and skipping TWO ads in YouTube, these guys are amazing

But what's faster?

[mark_reh]

Searching through hundreds of tabs or just typing your search into a new one?

I have a better idea. Why not reserve one tab (maybe the leftmost one) for searching open tabs? Then you won't have to scroll through them- just enter a key word or two on the tab search tab and the browser will switch to the tab you're looking for. Or even just use a hot-key that tells the browser that whatever you type after the hot-key is a search term for the open tabs.

Or better yet, don't keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open at once.

Re:But what's faster?

[bogaboga]

I love your ideas.

Even better; a key stroke combination to associate a number of tabs with the combination.

That is, once entered those tabs load automatically.

Re:But what's faster?

[dissy]

Searching through hundreds of tabs or just typing your search into a new one?
I have a better idea. Why not reserve one tab (maybe the leftmost one) for searching open tabs?

The addon "List Opened Tabs" lets you do both. You can put its icon anywhere (mines on the right, but left works too), and lists out tab titles in full, and has a search box.
I don't think it has a hotkey built in though.

Or better yet, don't keep dozens or hundreds of tabs open at once.

You can't tell me what to do!

Re:But what's faster?

[Tough Love]

just enter a key word or two on the tab search tab and the browser will switch to the tab you're looking for

Firefox already does that, using url suggestions. Chrome kind of does it but in a crappier way that has trouble with text not at the beginning of the url.

I use the XUL version of treestyletabs

[xack]

You need a non quantum browser to use it but it gets my tab addiction fixed. Shame Google took so long as they were working on more trackibg mechanisms instead.

Number 1 tab hoarder here....

[AbRASiON]

Firstly, introduce the right code for duplicate tab blocking.

I'm basically an ADHD browser, 100 tab average, 200 bad and 400 extreme.

When I open a new middle click Gmail tab, my fourth one of them, cause I lost the other 3. Use "pull to location" code, that will bring the existing open tab from it's spot to my new tab location, maybe refresh it.
That alone will save me a heap of hassle.

Fixed tab width so I can read tab names.
Some kind of tree or similar option to see what is what. .........

.

Re:Number 1 tab hoarder here....

[Lorens]

Not opening duplicate tabs (unless I really want it, which I sometimes do) is a feature I've wanted for a long time!

As for fixed tab width, I'd prefer a button to list all my tabs with the full name in some dropdown, for use when there gets to be so many tabs that the titles disappear. An automatically maintained folder in the tab or bookmarks bar would be perfect.

I've spent the last week editing and copy-pasting between several dozen Google Docs and spreadsheets, and both these features were sorely missed.

Re:Number 1 tab hoarder here....

[AbRASiON]

Firefox handles duplicate tab opening flawlessly. At least it used to wth the plugins I had installed.

The pull to tab (my name for it) was perfect. Go collect the dupe tab and pull it to the location where you're now song for it.

Listing all your tabs used to be an add-on for Firefox called "tabs menu"

Some of these add-ons work for Chrome but unfortunately, they're not exactly as good as they were in ff

Silly

[Anonymous Coward]

Task bars and window managers have already solved this a long time ago

Put tabs on the side

[CastrTroy]

I want an option to put tabs on the side, along the left or right. We all have widescreen monitors, but very few pages actually need the full width of the monitor. We should have the option of putting tabs vertically along the side of the monitor to make more efficient use of space.

Re:Put tabs on the side

[umberleigh]

Switch to Vivaldi. Same Chromium rendering engine, but with sane and configurable tab management. You can have vertical tabs on the left or right, or tabs along the top or bottom of the window if you want.

Re:Put tabs on the side

[Paul Neubauer]

Have you tried or considered the Vivaldi browser? Putting the tabs on the side (either side) is an option.

Re:Put tabs on the side

[sunami88]

I want an option to put tabs on the side, along the left or right. We all have widescreen monitors, but very few pages actually need the full width of the monitor. We should have the option of putting tabs vertically along the side of the monitor to make more efficient use of space.

Yes! This a thousand times! One of the main reasons I am so entrenched in Pale Moon is because it's the only browser I know of that still has the feature*. It's essential to me, particularly when you can group them, expand/collapse groups, etc.


* Unless I'm mistaken Tree Style Tabs was an XUL (?) extension, and died when Mozilla *slight eye twitch* went to Chrome-style addons.

Re:Put tabs on the side

[mea2214]

Tree Style Tabs plugin does this for Firefox. Been using that for a decade now. Wish Chrome had a similar plugin.

Re:Put tabs on the side

[theCoder]

I'm also a big TST fan, and I've been sitting at FF 56 for a while because of incompatibility. But just recently I downloaded FF63 and was able to get TST working in it. It has been ported to the Web Extensions API as a sidebar. However, there are a few customizations you have to do manually to make it work really correctly. To get the full experience, you have to add the following to chrome/userChrome.css in your profile directory:

/* Hide horizontal tabs at the top of the window */
#main-window[tabsintitlebar="true"]:not([extradragspace="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
  opacity: 0;
  pointer-events: none;
}
#main-window:not([tabsintitlebar="true"]) #TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
}
 
/* Hide title for only Tree Style Tab sidebar */
#sidebar-box[sidebarcommand="treestyletab_piro_sakura_ne_jp-sidebar-action"] #sidebar-header {
  display: none;
}

I also went into the preferences for TST and to the advanced section to enable the CSS marking unread tabs in red text and then also added this:

/* no need for "x" to close, just middle click */
.closebox {
  display: none;
}

None of these came from myself, but from various Internet sources. The userChrome.css came from links TST gives you after installing. Removing the "x" came from a google search (I didn't save so cannot reference).

So, it takes a bit of work, but you can get tree style tab working in newer Firefox versions. The only real question is why tree style tabs aren't the default.

Someone help me out here

[OzPeter]

Why do people have hundreds of open tabs at a time? I honestly can't imagine the use case for this.

Sure I have a large collection of bookmarks, but at most I only have a handful of tabs open at any time (any more and its because I didn't close a tab after I finished using it) and I know I cannot focus on more than a couple of things at a time.

Should I just be yelling at clouds and telling the kids to keep off my lawn?

Re:Someone help me out here

[Anonymous Coward]

For me it's usually because I'm working on something specific so I'll have maybe a dozen tabs related to that project that I flip through. Then I get another project but I don't want to lose my place with the previous project so now there are a dozen more tabs. Then another thing comes up that I have to work on, dozen more tabs.

As I complete projects I do close out the tabs but still at any given time I may have half a dozen things I'm working on and each one has a dozen tabs. Some projects take years to complete so those tabs just hang around.

Firefox's old tab groups was not perfect but pretty good compared to anything else. I could just have a group for each project with an easy overview page that let me move tabs around or switch to a specific project. I can't believe they removed that functionality. Idiots. I'm waiting for some dumbass millennial to have a revolutionary "new idea" that is the exact same thing.

Re:Someone help me out here

[OzPeter]

For me it's usually because I'm working on something specific so I'll have maybe a dozen tabs related to that project that I flip through. Then I get another project but I don't want to lose my place with the previous project so now there are a dozen more tabs. Then another thing comes up that I have to work on, dozen more tabs.

Is your work web-centric, or is it just that all of your reference materials are web-centric? (FWIW I work with actual desktop programs with very little web related work flows - only when I need to look up a specific vendors product from time to time etc)

But it seems like you have a set of well defined tabs for each project that you work on. So why can't you just do on a per project basis "save bookmarks to all open tabs", close them down and do an "Open all bookmarks to new tabs" when you need them again type action? I use Safari and it has this functionality built in.

And what happens when your computer/browser/whatever crashes and burns? How do you easily recover if you don't have the bookmarks to the tabs all neatly stored away? Manually opening 100's of tabs would suck big time.

Re:Someone help me out here

[OzPeter]

D'oh .. Only after replying I understood your comments about Firefox's previous functionality.

Re:Someone help me out here

[hackertourist]

I don't like bookmarks. Because they are not visible on screen, in my experience they become write-only memory: write bookmark, never think about it again.

I've got a bunch of long-term projects going on, each with a number of tabs. Having them as tabs serves as a constant reminder of unfinished business, which is something I need. Maybe this is a flaw in how my brain works, but I haven't found a better workaround than this.

Re:Someone help me out here

[Bite The Pillow]

Talk to management about how getting interrupted makes projects take longer. You will find that is true. Then get a prioritization system in place. And set a maximum of 2 active projects, no more interruptions till one of them is complete.

That's a far better solution.

Re:Someone help me out here

[houghi]

The most I have open is 50 or so YouTube videos I want to see one by one. Watch one, close it, go to the next.

Re:Someone help me out here

[Fly Swatter]

Some people once had desks completely covered with stacks of papers, even if they weren't relevant to the current task. These are those people, but now in the digital age.

Re:Someone help me out here

[dissy]

Is your work web-centric, or is it just that all of your reference materials are web-centric? (FWIW I work with actual desktop programs with very little web related work flows - only when I need to look up a specific vendors product from time to time etc)

I'm not the same person you replied to, but I follow a very close usage that just works best for me.
Especially when researching something new, I both want to learn all of my options as well as be able to follow the breadcrumb trail back to a point if some options turn out dead ends.

Hundreds of tabs is not, to me, ever a persistent state of things, but a given project or idea may both be fairly long running (weeks to months) and I do tend to have more than one in progress at a time (for example, days to weeks for something for work, and perhaps months for something personal as time and interest allows)

Also worth noting on your original question, you may find plenty of other peoples use cases here, but that does not mean even a single one necessarily map to a use case for you.
If you are looking possible improvements for yourself, well right on I hope for the best.
But for anyone that's been around the block, you have very likely found the best flow for yourself already.

Different people just work different ways. There may be an idea here or there you can sprinkle into your way of doing it, but I doubt you'll find some amazingly different usage that will completely change how you go about things.

And what happens when your computer/browser/whatever crashes and burns? How do you easily recover if you don't have the bookmarks to the tabs all neatly stored away? Manually opening 100's of tabs would suck big time.

Most browsers recover tabs, including Chrome. This is not often a problem anymore.
But similarly, most browsers only store the "last visited" date of a bookmark.
If you are trying to find your way back to a point in time and there is more than one option, I've found opening even just 4-5 bookmarks to see if they were it, updates that timestamp and now I've totally lost my timeline of events for the next search!

Suddenly those 5 bookmarks jump forward to the date I check them with no record of them being in the middle of the others made. To me it seems like opening many hundreds of bookmarks, in the exact proper order, to update them to be again in chronological order, is far more useless work.
I just conclude bookmarks don't work for me if I don't sort and categorize them, and I only feel that worthwhile to archive and keep the ones I intended to revisit.
Tabs work better for me to keep things in order for a more immediate grouping of time - typically the very process that results in what pages and info I want to bookmark as archived results.

Re: Someone help me out here

[basscomm]

I tried that, but a lot of webmasters got mad at me for dog-earing their pages

Re:Someone help me out here

[angel'o'sphere]

Why do people have hundreds of open tabs at a time? I honestly can't imagine the use case for this.
I open for every search a new window, and then open interesting search results in new tabs. It is quite easy to have more than 100 tabs open that way. I probably have at the moment 15 youtube tabs open ...

Re:Someone help me out here

[angel'o'sphere]

And what happens when your computer/browser/whatever crashes and burns? How do you easily recover if you don't have the bookmarks to the tabs all neatly stored away?
On Mac OS the browsers restore all tabs automatically.

Manually opening 100's of tabs would suck big time.
Automatic recovering of all tabs is also a pain. After all: they usually get all reloaded and not loaded from the cash.

Re:30+ Concurrent tabs

[Opportunist]

42 right now and counting.

Widescreen red herring

[yurikhan]

You're using your widescreen monitor wrong. Tile two windows side-by-side. Read documentation in one half, edit code in the other.

Of course, in that configuration, the only reasonable solution for tab hoarders is (a) grouping into several windows, and (b) multi-row tab bars.

Re:Widescreen red herring

[CastrTroy]

That's what my second monitor is for.

Re:Widescreen red herring

[yurikhan]

Well, my second monitor is for one more two-window split.

Re:30+ Concurrent tabs

[yuvcifjt]

Try Firefox, tab management and scrolling has been a "feature" for quite a long time now;

and Firefox Quantum (v57+) is generally faster than Chrome if not the same, and uses less memory on Windows.

Re:Tab Hoarders

[fibonacci8]

Or corporations, or churches. When the group is so broad and vaguely defined, it's becomes easy to misattribute the bad qualities of some the members of the group (people) to the group itself (not people).

• "I've met a vegan that won't shut up about being vegan" -> vegans won't shut up about being vegan
• "This one guy/gal won't stop trying to promote $X fitness program on social media" -> crossfitters are spammers
• "X people in this corporation were convicted of fraud/larceny/insider trading" -> X people in any corporation are getting away with it, they just haven't been caught yet
• "Catholic priests are convicted pedophiles" -> Priests are pedophiles

These are the sort of results people come up with when they don't understand how implication works. It's highly effective in politics. Five people may know about one immigrant that committed a violent crime. They spread the word, and since it came from five valid sources, clearly it must be about five different people (a false implication, but easy to make). They a get a law passed to tighten the definition of immigrant status. As a result many people who hadn't committed a crime before the new law are now "illegal" ex post facto. Then you get people running campaigns with platforms against "illegals". It's an easy to follow con job with an enormous paper trail. But it still fools enough people to work.

Re:30+ Concurrent tabs

[Joce640k]

The feature they *should* have added is a tab count display on the right of the bar.

Jesus fuck

[DarkRookie2]

Bookmark and close your damn tabs.
Wanna know why your system is running slow, you have 20+ tabs opened.

Re:Jesus fuck

[angel'o'sphere]

My system is not running slow.
About 20% CPU usage, 2770 threads, 271 processes.
Probably 200 of them are browser tabs.

I want a quick temporary "read later" list

[raymorris]

Personally I use bookmarks for long-term things, pages I expect to still want a year later. The bookmarks UI is appropriate for that type of use.

I tend to leave tabs open for things I'm likely to want to look at later today, or this week. I end up with a lot of tabs open, which isn't ideal.

What I'd like to have would be something like bookmarks but quicker to add, and especially remove, things from the "read later" list. Just have an X next to the entry so removing it is one click just like closing a tab. Maybe it would just keep the last 100 unread pages things dropping old items I've already returned to to keep the list manageable.

try Vivaldi

[gDLL]

it has tabs on bottom

TAB MIX PLUS for chrome....

[gDLL]

multi-row tab bar, i'm waiting :)

Re:30+ Concurrent tabs

[cmeans]

I have 3 Chrome windows: 78, 15 and 10 tabs. (I'm not going to mention my FF window.)

"Hello, my name is Chris, and I'm a tab-hoarder."

Tree Style Tabs

[labnet]

This is the reason I use Firefox.
I do electronic design and often have 100 tabs open.
Chrome had experimental vertical tabs then some dweeb developer decided no one needed them.
Do it now. Type in tree style tabs into FF and live a more productive life!
Not my windows start menu also love as a vertical tab, which makes sense since Hollywood forced us all to 16:9

I have you all beat

[ayesnymous]

Not only do I have multiple windows open, each with anywhere from 10-80 tabs open, but one of those tabs is a "Restore previous session" tab, which if I clicked on would open another several windows, each with multiple tabs... And one of THOSE tabs would be a "Restore previous session" tab... It's recursive for me.