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Comment by gmurphy | Hacker News Reader

This is a great use of Chromium!

Storytime! When we started designing Chrome back in 2006, and despite having spent the past year working on Google's Firefox team, my favorite browser was iRider, which was an IE shell with tree-style-tabs. It was too power-user for what we were going for, but some of the concepts (pinning) live on in Chrome today.

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> It was too power-user for what we were going for

Chrome might as well support the Sidebar API to make this possible like Firefox will do with Tree-Tab-Style Add-on iirc. I read a bug report once at the Chromium bug tracker saying roughly "Sidebar API wont be implemented because UI needs to stay simple".

I hate the "UI must be simple" aspect of chrome so much. So many features don't get implemented because of it.

Modern product managers and data science folks have a very inflated view of their ability to anticipate their user's desires, IMO. "Simplicity" has killed so much useful-to-the-user functionality in the past decade, like star ratings (fortunately iTunes still has them, at least), intuitive queues (remember the old Netflix DVD queue?), linear feeds of chronological data (hi Facebook and Twitter)...

Chrome had side tabs for years. Never overtly, but you could enable them manually. But they took them out because someone 'didn't like how they looked' and despite thousands of people starring the bug and hundreds of comments, they refused to even tolerate their existence as a hidden feature. They're very serious about making sure you use their software only the way they want.

Vivaldi has sidebar tabs, chrome under the hood.

Yeah, too bad some losers at Google killed off vertical side tabs which were working perfectly fine and were even a 'hidden feature' that had to be enabled manually... because they 'didn't like how it looked.' Of course they provided no alternative other than having a ton of nearly useless tiny little tabs which apparently looks 'better' to someone somewhere. Yes, I am bitter, why do you ask?

Yep, that was me.

The reasoning wasn't that we didn't like it and wanted to kill hidden features (as above, I loved it), but more that all things, even small or hidden ones, come with small and hidden cost, and cost is the end of large projects. It sounds a bit daft to many, but just having the code in the tree is a burden - tests run, translations need to be updated, and minor dependencies all over the place increase development costs persistently. For example, consider the staff who added the "audio indicator in tabs" functionality and how the presence of a separate tab system in the tree might cause them extra work, or how their work may inadvertently cause critical bugs in sidetabs that don't have an owner to fix it or care for it.

To keep Chrome nimble we attempt to cut and trim as much as we can, knowing that that annoys some. We don't always get this right, but it's better to aspire to do fewer things well than to be generally OK with crufty bits here and there.

I realize this explanation probably won't decrease the sadness, and you've probably heard something like it many times in the bug tracker, but if not, I hope it explains things a little.

> To keep Chrome nimble we attempt to cut and trim as much as we can

    $ du -sh /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/
    346M	/Applications/Google Chrome.app/

    $ du -sh /Applications/Firefox.app
    147M	/Applications/Firefox.app/

To be fair: "trimming as much as we can" doesn't mean you have to be the browser with the smallest file size on the market...

I'll keep my comments civil, but I really cannot say how absolutely evil, wrong, and arrogant that decision and attitude are, and how much I hate and despise Chrome on account of this and similar intentional design crippling and abuse.

(I've filed a number of bugs on several of them, based on the experience, I simply won't bother in future. It's absolutely clear that Google's goal is to driver users such as myself far, far away. Why should I fight that?)

I'll point though to the tyranny of the minimum viable user, and a rather massive Achilles' Heel Google have been manifesting of late.

https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_tyr...

I wish you guys would build a multiple rows of tabs UI, like Opera for desktop had. It was self-balancing (since you would eventually run out of browsing space), but in a better way than having everything just made tiny per column.

The one UX challenge you would need to solve though, that Opera did not, is how much horizontal space to use per tab, after it gets cramped. No-one would be happy with any particular default...

Some people have widescreen monitors, which makes side tabs the only sensible choice, really.

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