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Comment by boredguy8 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

  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.

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

I like Chrome.

holy shit. you just made my day.

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.

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.

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