Google is set to make a fundamental change to the way tabs behave in its Chrome browser (it’s still our favorite) by giving them plenty of room. Instead of resizing them into smaller and smaller tabs that make them hard to click on and read, Google may make Chrome tabs scrollable, or groupable.
Although the Chrome browser is the most popular in the world, it does have some notable flaws which other browsers are more than happy to fix. Firefox has more robust privacy protection and Vivaldi has powerful vertical tabs which offer a different way to jump between web pages and online services. Chrome is constantly being worked on though, and a Chrome developer shared an interesting insight in a recent Reddit chat that suggested tabs that can be scrolled through will soon be implemented in the web browser, Techdows.
Under a request for “Bigger tabs” or the ability to resize or scroll tabs in Chrome, Google engineer Peter Kasting replied with optimistic news.
“Scrollable tabstrip is in the works,” he said. He also suggested that anyone who was currently frustrated with the existing Chrome tab system, to “try using shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking to select multiple tabs at once, then drag out to separate windows to group tabs by window.”
That system is certainly viable, but not one that everyone wants to leverage. Other browsers offer different systems for dealing with browser windows that are jam-packed with tabs. Firefox windows with too many tabs offer buttons to scroll through the list, while the Vivaldi browser gives you the option to create groups of tabs so that you can return to what you’re looking for without jumping to a separate window. Firefox’s system also implements a minimum tab size, so that they always remain readable with ease.
Although Kasting’s statement suggests scrolling tabs is Google’s preference for its tab management, ChromeStory highlighted a bug associated with the planned change and detailed in the Chromium repository. It states “Users can organize tabs into visually distinct groups, eg. to separate tabs associated with different tasks.”
To us, that sounds a lot more like Vivaldi’s tab group system than Firefox’s scrollable tabs.
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