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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

I can relate, though maybe he is being a tad sensationalist.

I expect (say) my bookmarks to be synced between all my computers. I'm sure plugins do this on other browsers, though.

The biggest reason I don't consider Opera or FF for daily use anymore: Non-chrome browsers drive me crazy due to the way they close tabs. It is very stressful compared to mouse-closing tabs in Chrome and its "smart positioning."

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Using Chrome is like driving a luxury car for the first time. I remember when I got in a '93 Mercedes SL 500 in the rain and when I slowed down so did the windshield wipers. I know others replicated the behavior in later models, but driving that car made me realize that every other car was designed by people who didn't, apparently, drive cars.

I love using the 'smart tab positioning' example: how many times have people moved the mouse to close 4 or 5 tabs? Sure, it's not an impossible headache. But most of us do it regularly enough that it's nice to have the button in the same place for each tab. It's almost as if the designers used a web browser before. And it's great.

And hard to imagine giving up.

I love using the 'smart tab positioning' example: how many times have people moved the mouse to close 4 or 5 tabs?

I would expect that most people close multiple tabs with [cmd|ctrl]-w, precisely because of the back and forth mousing otherwise required. One thing I've worried about while using Chrome has been accidentally closing more than one tab at once, since, being a klutz, I don't have wonderful control over my index finger, and triple-clicking to select a paragraph is so common that I do it accidentally sometimes when intending to single click on a button or something. So far, I don't think it's actually happened very often, though.

If you accidentally close too many tabs, Shift-Ctrl-T will reopen them. And will remember content in forms.

I like Chrome.

Shift-cmd-t makes you wonder what the hell everybody else is doing that it took so long to get this feature.

Actually, its been in Firefox for at least as long as Chrome has existed... I can't remember a Firefox build without it, but... it's been a while.

You are, of course, correct. I don't know what I was thinking. I haven't really used ff since switching to chrome, although I find I do need to boot it up to make the occasional flash application work. Also, webkit-based browsers have some wonky css handling. I guess my brain has some sort of cognitive bias where I unknowingly attribute everything that's awesome about Chrome to Chrome itself.

Also, Ctrl-Z in Opera also works, which makes perfect sense and is less for the user to learn, and is discoverable (in the sense, they can go to the standard Edit -> Undo menu which is more visible.) Although actually, Opera also has a visible basket of closed tabs on the right of the tab bar, which is even better.

holy shit. you just made my day.

  I would expect that most people close multiple tabs with [cmd|ctrl]-w

If you think most people use keyboard shortcuts, we're working with completely different customers ;) Finding someone that uses the keyboard to copy/paste is decently common, but I rarely see use of shortcuts beyond that.

I find I use mouse close most often when I'm "info dumping", as mouse scroll and cmd+click to open a new tab are, for me, mouse operations. Rapid open/close of several pages is normal. Once I have 3-5 on a topic, I go "info diving" and nothing gets closed 'till the end, at which point cmd+w is how I tend to close out of the extra pages I had open. But cmd+w by even power users is, in my experience rare.

It would be great if the browser taught people these things during use. Kind of like some small drop down at the top "I see your closing a lot of tabs, have you tried ctrl-w?".

As it stands unless I'm wrong a user would have to go digging for these shortcuts online or by clicking help and actually knowing what they are looking for. Seems like a stretch for most browser users.

For a common task such as closing tabs mouse gestures should be used. There is no need to hunt buttons you just use your muscle memory.

I've been leaning back towards firefox recently due to how chrome handles large number of tabs: poorly. It'll squeeze them down to the point that they wont even show the favicon, making finding an open page annoying - compared to firefox, which has a minimum tab length, and scrolls the tab bar if it grows too large to fit.

The rest might be a personal prefference, but I rarely use the mouse to close tabs anyway, ctrl+w is faster, and I can hit that as many times as I want without moving the cursor anywhere. I also preffer the / and ' shortcuts firefox has.

Just curious, but if you have that many tabs open why not split them into different windows?

If it's split into windows, not only do I have to hover over every tab to find the one that I want, but also repeat the process for every open window.

The alternative is sorting the tabs somehow, but that's more maintance than a middle click.

That's why I use FireFox's Tree Style Tabs add-on.

Indeed - the lack of a multiline tab bar for Chrome is mystifying. No extensions do the trick, either.

Compared to closing several tabs in Chrome, doing a similar thing in the Win7 shell (close several open folders) is infuriatingly difficult. The target size of the close icon is so small, and missing it is doubly bad: it makes you start the task all over again, plus a random window is now positioned to the front destroying your work context.

Eh? Window close buttons are larger than tab close buttons.

In Windows 7, you can hover over the taskbar icon for a browser and it will show a preview of all your tabs. Clicking on the tiny close button on a tab's preview will close the tab, but if you miss it, you will switch to that tab (and window) instead.

Thanks, this is the UI I'm referring to.

I also sort of wish I could press Alt+Tab, and have clickable close buttons in that UI.

you can middle click the text and it'll close it.

just like how you can middle close to close a tab in most browsers

How is mouse-closing tabs in Chrome different and what is "smart positioning"? Didn't notice myself.

When you have many tabs open in Chrome, the length of each tab shrinks so that they all fit in the bar. Smart positioning refers to, when you click a close button on one of the tabs, the rest don't expand to fill the remaining space until you move your mose away, so that the next tab's close button falls under your cursor in case you want to close it as well.

When you close a tab, tabs could become larger because there is now more space for each one.

But in Chrome they aren't resized until your mouse leaves that area. This way you can close multiple tabs with clicking, no movement required.

This design quirk is so useful and amazing how others haven't though of it before (once you see it it seems such an obvious idea) that some days I think about looking through the Chromium source and finding the name of the developer who created this interface feature so he/she could be properly thanked.

It was designed and implemented by Ben Goodger, the front end lead.

true, it was a bit over the top. I've edited to "can't go back to any other browser than Chromium/V8 anymore." which is closer to my actual feelings :)

And this comes from a former hardcore Mozilla fan :)

I've barely used Chrome before, but shouldn't you use mouse gestures to close tabs in Opera? It's by far the easiest way, along with ctrl+w. No need to aim and click on a specific button.

That's a terrible reason not to use FF -- all you have to do is middle click anywhere on a tab.

I have been using Chrome since it came out but this month I am trying FF 4.0 and it's pretty good.

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