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Comment by pkamb | Hacker News Reader

After a quick look-over, I'll be sticking with Chrome due to two small UX issues that Chrome does exceedingly well:

1. Despite both having "tabs on top", in Chrome tabs extend all the way to the edge of the screen. In Opera, there's a small unclickable border area. This is a basic, basic Fitts' Law mistake that makes it so much harder to click tabs.

2. Chrome does that thing where when you close a tab, the "close" button of the next tab ends up exactly under your mouse pointer. This is such a nice and natural feature that you forget there was any alternative. Firefox and Opera both get this so wrong.

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Opera lets you bypass the anachronistic 'tab' metaphor completely:

http://imgur.com/XuMkx.png

Use Ctrl-Tab to switch between tabs the same way you Alt-Tab between windows. Close a tab with Ctrl-F4, similar to closing windows with Alt-F4.

Firefox with Vimperator does even better - t to open a tab to a url or search string, d to close a tab, Ctrl-n and Ctrl-p to tab between them.

Of course, Chrome's Vim extension replicates similar functionality. Either way, reducing mouse-keyboard context-switching is useful.

A trackpoint is my way of reducing mouse-keyboard context switching :)

Also, right click + scroll

Do you know if there is a way to quickly jump to a specific window in Opera, with a strings search, like in Vimperator? This would be really nice.

This is interesting I have my tabs placed to the left and it works fine. When the tabs are placed at the top however they cannot be clicked on from the edge of the screen. Placing the tabs on the left has always made sense to me since most websites are designed for resolutions that are far smaller than 1920 pixels. The real real estate is the vertical space. Placing the tabs on the left also allows me to have a small preview of the page without waiting for the mouse over. I understand this solution is not for everyone.

Opera seems to listen to the community relatively closely so hopefully these two issues can be solved in a future patch (or maybe even an extension).

Yeah I've submitted bug reports about the tab-clicking thing, but their response has always been "but how else would the user drag the window!?!". Stupid. I'd love to see the metrics on how often users drag a full-screen window vs. how often they click a tab.

There was a brief period of time when the tabs did extend to the very top of the screen in Opera, but they changed it back to this. Presumably to make it easy to drag the window around.

I don't actually use the tabs to click on, so this is fine for me. I always switch by holding down my right mouse button and spinning the scroll wheel.

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