Google to Remove Chrome “Close Other Tabs” and “Close Tabs to the Right” Options | Hacker News Reader

Google to Remove Chrome “Close Other Tabs” and “Close Tabs to the Right” Options

bleepingcomputer.com

62 pointsaaron69587 comments

There's a chrome extension called 'OneTab' that I tend to use for this purpose anyway.

You can whitelist certain websites (for instance, I whitelist email because I want to keep it open and AWS because the login is a pain).

Any time I feel like my current stash of tabs is out of control, I hit the onetab button and everything that's not that important gets archived into an html file that's automatically opened in a tab when the button is pressed (so 10+ tabs get archived down into one). This way I can clean up my tab mess without losing anything.

https://www.one-tab.com/

(I am not affiliated)

In case it's helpful: in Chrome you can shift-click and select ranges of tabs and close them all at once.

Wow! My first thought was, "How would anyone discover that?" How did you?

I discovered it ... by reading the linked article to the end. Now if they knew about it before I'd like to know how ;-)

For me it was documented in another browser and I tried it in Chrome and it worked.

I tried shift-clicking a range of tabs on a whim about a year ago, and it worked.

Once you've done that, you can drag the whole selection into another window or a new window too.

This has been a pattern for selecting ranges of text for a long time: if you place your cursor in one location and shift click in another it will select all the text in between. Also works with most file browsers. It's not too hard to imagine generalizing this to tabs, too.

Bonus fact: the itemized selection done via Ctrl-click also works with tabs. If you use Ctrl-W you can close these tabs, or if you drag one of them you can extract all the selected tabs to a new window.

Speaking of patterns, I was pleasantly surprised that cmd+g works same on many browsers as in text editors - navigates to a next search result.

> It's not too hard to imagine generalizing this to tabs, too.

For sure, it's an "obvious in retrospect" sort of thing once stumbled upon. :) After a bit of research, the mechanics appear to have debuted in Chrome in 2013. Any earlier examples?

Because it's the same as selecting files in Explorer

There's a GIF at the end of the linked article.

Chrome is becoming the browser of the masses. Power user usability features are disappearing. I'm still upset over the removal of the backspace key as "back" navigation.

I shouldn't need an extension for this.

> Chrome is becoming the browser of the masses.

Well it's clearely been targeting the masses since the beginning.

When Chrome first came out it was applauded for things developers and powerusers cared about: a sandboxed multiprocess approach, a fast JavaScript engine, low memory footprint (this is hilarious in 2017), open-source, a task manager, etc.

Remember this guy? [1] It's a 40 page comic book of stuff the masses would never care about.

[1] https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html

ISTR they said they didn't care about browsers, but they wanted to show other browsers how they thought it should be done.. with no intent for long-term investment... But as a true weasel I have nothing to reference.

My muscle memory has adjusted to Alt+Left (thanks to their reminder popup.) However, I've moved onto being upset by webcomics that bind the arrow keys without filtering out Alt+Arrows, resulting in an unfortunate combination of history and non-history navigation when attempting to use this shortcut.

See, I hate that reminder popup. Like, "Oh, yeah, we know that you've been using backspace to go back in your web browser since 1997, but we're going to take that away. We're not going to use the functionality for anything else. We're just going to pop up a smug dialog box every time you hit backspace telling you that backspace is deprecated and to relearn this command for no good reason."

The reason is that you can now press backspace on a website with 100% certainty that you aren't going to lose all the state you just spent 30 minutes on filling out.

That's QWERTY-centric. On my AZERTY keyboard, I can't press Alt+left with one hand, because the right Alt key is replaced with an AltGr key which doesn't work like the Alt key. So on Chrome, I have currently no way to go back one page with one hand.

> the backspace key as "back" navigation

That was a ridiculous usability nightmare and was only popular due to muscle memory from IE doing it long ago (it was a terrible decision back then, too).

Good riddance to it, may no one ever again unfocus a form field by accident and wipe out an entire form with a single keypress.

> wipe out an entire form with a single keypress.

That's a bug in the browser caching design, not an issue with backspace navication.

Good riddance indeed! A big thank you from me and my blood pressure to the developers who finally pushed through the removal of that godforsaken nightmare of a human interface feature :)

Agreed, and although I get that patches breaking muscle memory are annoying, the potential downsides to that are so disastrous that the arguments around it puzzle me quite a bit to this day.

In fact, the whole conversation surrounding this issue made me see for that, although hyperbolic, XKCD 1172 [1] actually isn't that contrived...

[1]: https://xkcd.com/1172/

I use Chrome for testing and I'm constantly astounded. Apparently I need an add-on just to open a blank page on browser load, and even then you have to manually remove the about:blank text before entering the first url.

If I'm wrong tell me how.

I'm almost surprised some of the "power user" features aren't gone already, like search keywords.

What are the cool kids using these days, I wouldn't mind a change

Pale Moon ;)

It'll support XUL when Firefox drops it.

I've used Tree Style tabs too long to give it up.

UI doesn't constantly change. The UI is pre-Australis. This is one of the reasons I moved to Pale Moon.

In the hopes that you might know something about this: I'm on an attempt to move back to Firefox for various reasons. Tree Style Tabs (and tab unloader) are big reasons for this.

In the past I moved to Chrome because Firefox seemed bloated, but after many (HN) articles arguing that this has been fixed, i decided to give FF another chance.

But today I noticed that despite the fact that Tab Unloader actually does unload tabs, the Firefox process takes 1.5 Gigs on my computer even though pretty much all tabs should be unloaded at this point. It also seems to take longer for FF to show up when I alt-tab to it.

Am I doing something wrong here, or is FF still a bloaty piece of (admittedly) configurable shit? I really don't want to move back to Chrome, but there isn't enough ideology in me to opt for Firefox if it still sucks.

I'm in the same boat. I always used ff even though it's slower. it's better. Last month I ran ff and chrome both clean for 3 days. chrome was faster so I switched to it for two weeks. It's running ok, but I hate it. I hated it before, and I guess that didn't change all these years and this past month. It doesn't even have an option or a way for an addon to remove the x button from the tabs. I hate the way the chrome devs build chrome. It feels like tech-wise chrome runs better. But I will switch back to ff again end of the month. I gave chrome a good try. I am willing to wait 1 second longer every time I visit a website, every day. That's a lot. but at least it will work like I want it. And if it crashes, then I can just restore everything with one click. Unlike chrome that still crashes but I need to two clicks per window to restore everything..

Chrome was never a power user browser.

The hint is the name: like falling a hairless man "Curly", Chrome had less UI chrome and festures than other browsers when released.

The awesome dev tools were simply because they dogfood well.

You mean "calling" a hairless......

True! Too late to edit now... ditto with "festures" :P

Removing the ability to view the SSL cert details by clicking the padlock was more annoying... Now you need to navigate through "Developer tools".. WTF

It's always been a browser of the masses - and a tool to keep eyeballs on Google properties.

"close other tabs" is the only option I use. Good to know they are removing it!

That can be easily done by dragging the tab into another window and closing the window with the other tabs.

Yes. Easily. Very convenient having three context switches. First you drag out the tab, it maximizes in its own window, you minimize that window, you go back to the other window, close it, then find the window you just created. Much better than two mouse clicks, I'm sure.

drag tab → alt-tab → alt-f4

It's not as easy as the two mouse clicks though.

Sure you can do that. A little clunky though.

I live and die by these two cmds on my browser. wow. how else do people manage the avalanche of tabs that is browsing today?

I am a tab hoarder and cannot survive without https://www.one-tab.com/

I use Tab Wrangler https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tab-wrangler/egnjh...

As someone who rarely has more than a few tabs open, I honestly don't get this. What are you doing with so many tabs?

I can't speak for the other commenters, but for me it's because my browsing style was formed back in the days of dialup in Australia. You'd click a link and wait 30+ seconds to have the page load, so instead of staring a loading page you'd open anything that looked interesting in a new tab and continue on the current page, so all the interesting links would be there ready to read without waiting. invariably you wouldn't end up having enough time to read them all, but they piqued your interest enough to open them, so you'd keep them around in the hope that some time later you would. Rinse, lather, repeat, and add in persistent browser sessions between restarts and suddenly you've got 100+ tabs open.

The internet is much faster these days, but I still open way more links than I actually have time to read because they sound interesting

I do that with HN actually. I visit between a few times a day and once every second day. I open whatever I think is interesting. Usually 1-10 tabs every time I go to HN. then I spend time in one or two tabs and read a lot, and close these two. Then I still have 8 tabs open. Second step is repeat. Third step is I have 400 tabs open.

Use case that I'd guess many on HN would relate to: research and source documents.

When researching some topic, it's common to have the source document or documents open and then other tabs where people comment on them.

For example, if I'm checking some Python docs, I'll sometimes check how more knowledgeable programmers have solved some edge cases.

It's not hyperbole to say that Tabs Outliner changed my browsing life. Make per-task windows, open and save them at will.

I use these everyday, they better have flags to re-enable them. Would be annoying to have to drag a tab to a new window and close the other window.

I don't understand why it's preferable to remove the functionality vs having some better settings that allow me to customize my browser experience.

Because "old" is "bad." Throw away everything that makes people happy and start with reinventing the wheel. Also, corporations are slow, unresponsive and inconsiderate because incompetent people can hide and also bureaucracy.

What else needs the menu space, since competition for menu space seems to be the sole justification?

Switch to firefox, before google's heavyweight prowess forces it out of the market!

Firefox on macOS takes an order of magnitude longer to start or do anything than Chromium (Chrome, Opera) or Safari.

may be, or may be not. However, does it really matter how long the browser takes to start when you don't ever really close the browser (but only the tabs)?

A bowser isn't a Sun box. In the real world, browsers and computers restart occasionally. Also, opening a new tab in FF hangs everything for several seconds whereas in Chrome and Safari it's still responsive. It's like FF is doing everything on the main event queue synchronously.

Numbers. Even with a top-tier SSD and 16 GiB of fast RAM starting cold (with minimal, necessary plugins):

FF: 25s

Safari: 13s

Chrome: 8s

Without plugins, hot restart (absolutely worthless):

FF: 5s

Safari: 3s

Chrome: 2s

Using FF UX is like replacing an SSD with an HDD.

FF has a nice mission, but it doesn't matter if it's not better than the others, which includes both being usable and fast, in addition to privacy and security.

Conclusion: FF is nice in theory, but not currently usable in practice unless you enjoy wasting your time.

I mean, I have my browser and computer restart one 1-2 times a day, and I'd still prefer 25 seconds of startup vs losing functionality like close tabs to the right. I routinely end up with windows with 20-40 tabs when I'm researching an issue and will want to close all but a handful when I've found the information I need. Other people definitely use browsers differently than me, but it's FF is not useless in practice for everyone

As someone that likes the stated Mozilla mission and always wished them the best, I unfortunately have to agree with /BrailleHunting about Firefox performance on Mac OS.

Not only does FF take a while to start up but when it is loading a mildly heavy page or even after updating, it can freeze up for several (as in 10-20) seconds.

Damn. I tried switching back to Firefox with the assumption that these issues were fixed. After using it for the past few days, it really 'felt' dog-slow, but I assumed it was just prejudice on my end :-/.

Huh. Doesn't happen to me. I'd suggest using about:memory to see if you have a leaky tab. In my case, it used to be that my FB and Twitter tabs both leaked a lot. I stopped leaving Twitter open and FB (or Firefox) seems to have fixed their problem.

Yeah, I tried that. the about:memory usage reported is much lower (and strikes me as more reasonable).

I use an unload tab extension so currently there should be no 'open' tabs. Memory usage is at 1.5Gb though. It doesn't seem to go much higher or lower, though, so could it be that FF just takes/keeps the RAM it can get and doesn't bother to unload stuff?

It's also true that my MacBook has become slower in general since I updated to the latest MacOS, so perhaps it's not FF fault. Still, very annoying.

So sad! Don't want to install 2 more plugins. (Chrome doesn't allow more than one top-level menu item in a plugin)

Well I hope there is an extension to get those options back as I used them regularly to to "reset" after I've solved a problem or moved on to a new ticket and see I've got some 15 tabs open for research that I no longer need. Really they are removing this and leaving in "Bookmark all tabs"? Are you kidding me, what a stupid thing to leave in if you are so concerned about context menu space...

I use "bookmark all tabs" quite a bit. If I've got 15 tabs open for research that I want to read later...

Hmm, interesting way of using it. I've used extensions in the past to save off a group of tabs but I wouldn't want them in my bookmarks as I view them as temporary.

Yea I do that too.. Now I have more than 1000 bookmarks. :(

The issue comments say as of 2 days ago they are no longer considering removing CTTR. Whew.

Usage stats, from article:

- Duplicate: 23.21%

- Reload: 22.74%

- Pin / Unpin tab: 13.12%

- Close tab: 9.68%

- Reopen closed tab: 8.92%

- New tab: 6.63%

- Close tabs to the right: 6.06%

- Mute tab: 5.38%

- Close other tabs: 2.20%

- Unmute tab: 1.41%

- Bookmark all tabs: 0.64%

I use "Bookmark all tabs" all the time. It's a handy way to capture a subject matter dive for later reference.

Guess I am both the 2.20% and the 6.06%. Will be really sad to see this go.

Part of the 6.06%!

I will definitely miss the close tabs to the right option. Interesting that Duplicate is so popular; I've never really used it for anything, ever.

I use it a lot when developing - I'll have a tab open and then I'll want another tab of the same URL except for a slightly different port number or hostname. I find it faster to duplicate the tab, make the change and hit enter than to select the URL, open a new tab, paste the URL, make the change and hit enter.

I use it so much that I finally tracked down how to do it with the keyboard: Alt-D, Alt-Enter. (Shift focus to the address bar and select its contents; open a new tab with the contents of your selection).

Then I started using a computer with a Model M keyboard with no Windows key and had to remap my i3 modifier to Alt on all my computers to fix my muscle memory. Alt-D is the default shortcut for dmenu, i3's default program launcher, and i3 intercepted shortcuts before chrome. So I eventually rebound dmenu to a totally unmnemonic Alt-C... but now I've realized that Vimium allows me to duplicate tabs by typing yyP ("yy" yank contents of address bar to clipboard, "P" open new tab with current contents of clipboard).

All this to say, I love my duplicate tabs and these 6%ers who love killing tabs (but just to the right) are weirdos.

Thank you so much for this.

Duplicating tabs is by far my most used feature out of that menu for me and it always irked me that there was no keyboard shortcut available for it and I had to resort to using the mouse to do it (the amount of time lost hitting "Pin tab" or "Reload" by accident - I cannot even begin to tell). That being said, I didn't go out of my way to google for a workaround, either. Maybe, with all the features (or rather what's left) being taken away, I figured there was no hope (but for a dedicated extension) to achieve it.

I will now have to retrain my muscle memory to replace the ordeal before with just Alt-D, Alt-Enter - I don't think it will take long at all.

btw remember the old Opera? Customizable Keyboard Shortcuts (not to even mention customizable Mouse Gestures) - wherever did we lose all this along the way...

Is it really necessary to "optimize" a menu that is mostly unused by everyone (I agree on the point that it's a crowded menu - I'd really love to be able to configure the entries I want in there, but that option is apparently not even on anyone's mind at chrome)

I really hope they don't remove mute/unmute. I absolutely love that feature. Most users don't seem to know about it.

I think most people just click the speaker icon to mute / unmute instead of using the menu options.

If the reasoning is just to save menu space, there must be some prejudice against these close tab options, otherwise why not first targeting the bottom 2 least used options?

Well, 'Unmute tab' is not part of the default menu (you need to first mute the tab for it to become visible.)

I'd imagine 'Bookmark all' is not targeted because there's no simple alternative for it.

What I'd love though is an option to manage tabs by filter.

- Click a button (or press a hotkey). A popup with a list of all tabs appears.

- Enter `hackern` (or ny or something similar) to filter the list down to hacker news tabs.

- Click Close Selected (you could also do "move to new window").

One day I'm going to write a plugin for this, unless somebody reads this and steals the idea :-)

Is that also going to disappear from atom and other electron apps ? Or is this feature re-implemented in electron itself ?

It won't be long before these features are written into an extension. Then the 6% of users who use them can install that extension.

I'm pretty upset to hear this... I actually use that feature everyday!

I don't care for the keyboard shortcuts very much

I want a Ctrl + K shortcut.

In IE it dublicated the current tab including the browsing history. It was sooo useful.

Just when I started to get used to it! Oh Google!

sad news for me, I use both every single time :(

well that settles it, im changing browser

Do non-power users even right-click on tabs? Literally what is the issue with having the option if I right-click? Fucking stupid to take it out, it's just another nudge back towards Firefox...

Yeah, well, I gave it a shot with some ideological reasons to boot and based on comments here and my own experiences I'll probably move back to Chrome soon. Fourth time this happened. I'm starting to wonder if either there's something wrong with Mozilla as a company, or if they just can't compete with the money Google is throwing at this. Either option is depressing, even if just because I love Tree Style Tabs.

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