Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome | Hacker News Reader

Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome

theinvisibl.com

133 pointssolipsist56 comments

> In placing the close button on the right, Google have assumed that in the majority of cases, users are going to be wanting to close the most recently opened tabs first (likely to be the ones to the far right of the tab group) and have accordingly placed the close button on the right.

Really? Doesn't it make more sense that Chrome is primarily a Windows/Linux program where the close-window buttons are at the top-right, and Safari is primarily Mac where the buttons are at the top-left.

Is Arabic language Chrome more likely to be installed on a Mac? That would support your theory.

A quick google image search for Arabic versions of windows shows that they have the close button on the left and the window title on the right. So it is possible that chrome is simply mimicking windows behaviour.

Why? My theory is just that browsers are developed primarily for English, and that both Safari and Chrome put the close-tab buttons on the same side as the close-windows buttons for their respective primary operating system. Chrome in Arabic was developed as an afterthought, and it was just easier to flip the whole UI around.

Why would they save work on the in-tab UI and make the close-tab X button on the right? The window control buttons are on the left like any other Mac app, and the same goes for the closing X button on the Developer Tools frame. Both of those are on the right in Windows. As you saw with the Arabic screenshot, they've already done the work to allow the closing X buttons to be on the left; if they wanted the Mac tab closing buttons to be on the left, they'd be on the left. It's not just a holdout from Windows.

While this seems plausible to me -- I'm on Linux, and other tabbed apps like gnome-terminal place the close-window button on the right -- I think that Chrome's behavior makes the most sense anyway. When you close a tab, tabs shift towards the left. Meaning that the left-most tab in your browser is always the oldest tab, and generally speaking tabs on the left are older than tabs on the right (precluding the possibility that you manually rearranged the tabs). So since tabs on the left tend to be the oldest, they're also the least likely to be closed soon, and tabs on the right tend to be younger, so they're more likely to be closed soon. Hence the close-on-the-right behavior.

Except that by default, Chrome opens new browser tabs adjacent to the tab you're reading. When I command-click a link in an older session of HN, the new tabs don't show up on the far right (unless all the tabs to the right of the HN tab were opened from this window in this way).

I would actually prefer all tabs open on the far right because I tend to use tabs in a very random access way and Chrome forces me to think more.

I'd assume they measured it with real user usage.

You're much more likely to close recently opened tabs though.

Dupe of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=988411 with lots of discussion

My bad. I tried looking ahead of time to see if this had been posted before on HN and didn't find anything. I think it's because of the post's title, which differed from the article's. I was also under the impression that HN didn't allow repeat submissions, but I guess that feature expires after a certain amount of time. Does anyone know a close to fool-proof way for searching to see if an article has already been posted before?

No problem. I guess "dupe" was a bit harsh. I just remember seeing this on here before and that there were a lot of comments which others might enjoy seeing. You're right, the post permalink has been changed. HN allows repeat submissions after some amount of time, though. I use searchyc.com to search for previous submissions, but it's not completely fool-proof.

Great, thanks for the link. This seems to be a better alternative to a Google search on HN.

You might have tried something like http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=theinvisibl.co...

But I don't think that works here either.

It looks like they changed the page name from "http://www.theinvisibl.com/news/2009/12/08/a-piece-with-a-lo... as that is the name cached by Google. Perhaps some clever cloaking for SEO purposes ...?

Ordinarily a Google search for "link:http://www.theinvisibl.com/news/2009/12/08/a-piece-with-a-lo... site:ycombinator.com" would do it I think.

410 days ago? I had just noticed this behavior in Chrome myself a few weeks ago, and thought it might be new beta behavior that no one had really talked about. Guess not.

Chrome's tab behaviour is superb. I also /love/ the Shift-Apple-T shortcut, which re-opens the last tab you closed with its Back button history intact. I use that several times a day.

Chrome’s UI is great but it’s also always the little details that kill it for me. After enjoying Chrome’s instant search (search results and pages load while you are typing) tremendously on a Windows laptop I once again decided to make Chrome my default browser instead of Safari on OS X, at least for a time. That was a week ago and I’m already back to Safari.

The problem was Chrome’s behavior when tearing off tabs. On OS X I usually don’t surf fullscreen, most of the time I have two windows with several tabs and varying widths open, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Creating two windows and placing them about right is easy with Safari, I click a tab and drag all the way to the screen edge where I want the window to be. (I basically click and flick my finger to the left or to the right on the trackpad, it’s impossible to miss.) The window will be placed with all its content on the screen. Quickly creating overlapping windows by tearing off tabs is also easy. You just have to drag down. Again, nothing will leave the screen.

Chrome doesn’t allow you to be so careless. The tab will end up exactly where your mouse is pointing even if that means that most of the window is not visible on the screen. You cannot quickly flick with your finger to create a second window and place it in roughly the right spot.

It was a very frustrating experience for me. Chrome really is nearly perfect in all other respects but such a glaring shortcoming is not really tolerable for something I use as frequently as a browser. I prefer how Chrome handles closing tabs but I much more often tear of tabs than closing several of them. (I also tend to use the keyboard shortcut for closing tabs but that is not an excuse for Safari to get closing tabs wrong. The right answer when someone brings up problems or clever tricks when using some application with the mouse is definitely not to say “But there are keyboard shortcuts!” I don’t think you should ever use keyboard shortcuts as excuses for botching an app’s behavior when using the mouse.)

As a (windows) mouse user, having the tab tear off and sit right where I expect it to, directly underneath the cursor where I point it to, is desired behaviour.

I don’t understand why you would want that. What’s the use case? Don’t you nearly always want all of the browser window to be on the screen? You can still drag the titlebar if you want to drag the window off the screen but when do you actually need that? I can’t think of any scenario.

Meanwhile, positioning windows with the flick of my finger instead of bringing my mouse painstakingly in the right position seems just so preferable, I don’t even understand how Chrome’s behavior could ever be preferable. It’s not so bad on Windows because there are drag areas on the left and right of the screen to quickly allow you to create two windows next to each other but this functionality doesn’t exist on the Mac. (It also seems like a lame workaround.)

(Safari creates a little proxy image of the browser tab when you tear it off – maybe 200 pixels or so wide – with your mouse centered in the middle of it. If the newly spawned window doesn’t move off the screen the new window will spawn centered on your pointer, this is the expected behavior given the visual representation. All is nicely and logically animated. Chrome would obviously also have to change the way they visually represent torn off tabs if they want to implement this behavioral change though as to not confuse users.

Here is how this looks – imagine a mouse pointer in the middle of the little proxy window, it will be spawned all the way up to the right edge as soon as I release the mouse button: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4073000/tabs.png)

Firefox also has this, and I presume Safari does too (I don't use it, so excuse inaccuracies).

Safari does; the shortcut is Cmd-Z, because you're "undoing" the closing of the tab.

But it doesn't resurrect the whole tab's history like Chrome does. Safari simply opens a new tab with the last-viewed site in the killed tab.

Also, you can middle-click on the back/forward buttons to open the previous/next page from the history in a new tab. Another really nice touch.

the other browsers have this, but its only in chrome that the new tab retains the entire history stack of the original tab. so you hold cmd and press the back button, then in the new tab you can continue pressing back multiple times! only chrome does this, firefox fails.

only problem is, i have to cmd+click, i cant middle click the back button.

edit: you can also cmd+long click on the back button and get the same behaviour from the menu. why cant everything be this comprehensively functional?

Two other Mac projects that bring the excellent Google Chrome tab UI into other contexts: TotalFinder, a Finder mod that adds tabs to Finder windows (http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/), and Kod--still in beta--which will be a text editor somewhere in the ballpark of the mythical TextMate 2 (http://kodapp.com).

While the tab behaviour is good, the close buttons are hopelessly small. They are a tiny 12px by 12px on Windows. Compare this to the close window buttons, which are 64px by 24px.

Compounding the error is the poor choice of middle-click as the alternative close mechanism. Many older mouses and most laptops don't have middle click. When browsing on my laptop I can't use the touchscreen to close a tab, as the hit area is much to small to accurately hit. Likewise, using the trackpad to land the pointer on the button is something I find difficult to do reliably.

I don't understand why the hit area can't be increased. There is little penalty for incorrectly closing a tab, as Chrome has a handy "Recently closed tabs" menu.

Edit: A search turned up the newer "Chrome Toolbox" plugin, which brings the missing double-click-to-close behaviour to Chrome tabs.

I disagree about middle-click being a "poor" method. Middle-clicking is essential to mouse-based browsing these days, both for opening links in a new tab and for closing tabs. With middle-click, the whole issue of close button placement becomes moot.

Any laptop that doesn't have a separate middle-click button (hint: made by a fruit company laptops) likely provides some multi-touch method for middle-clicking. I also haven't come across a mouse in quite some time that does not have a middle-click (I use a including an 8 year old microsoft mouse).

"Any laptop that doesn't have a separate middle-click button (hint: made by a fruit company laptops) likely provides some multi-touch method for middle-clicking."

Middle click is good because it is consistent with the open-in-new tab, however there really should be an option for devices without middle click. It's not just Apple devices. Neither my Toshiba or Acer laptops have middle click.

On Mac it's Cmd+click, on Windows maybe it's Ctrl+click?

Do most laptops come with middle click buttons? I can't remember ever seeing one that does, and I've used plenty of non-Apple laptops.

My own anecdotal observations suggest most laptops don't have a dedicated middle-click button, though most do emulate a middle click when the right and left buttons are simultaneously pressed.

Consider teaching yourself to use Ctrl/Cmd-W. Once you've done that and some of the other shortcuts (like Ctrl/Cmd-T to open a new tab, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift-T to reopen a closed one), you'll rarely need a mouse for most websites.

I personally don't like either.

First thing I do in Firefox is set it so I have one close X at the far right end of the bar. I realize this does require it to be fairly visible which tab is current but I still like that this button is always where I want it to be. My mouse always heads to the same location to close any tab, I can close multiples by clicking multiple times in the same place, and I don't waste space on every tab with X buttons when I could be seeing more of the tab title.

Just my personal preference but feels far more efficient to me.

Close button on the right is one of the many reasons I use Seamonkey.

More efficient than Cmd-w (or Ctrl-w)?

No, not more efficient than Ctrl-W for closing, I use that frequently. However when discussing UI design and wasted space, putting an X on every tab is much less efficient than just one at the end.

Here is a library for putting chrome tabs into your osx apps:

https://github.com/rsms/chromium-tabs

Its basically the cocoa implementation of chrome's tabs ripped out and put into its own objective c lib. used by kod and other things mentioned in here. It includes all the seamless dragging and dropping of tabs between windows, everything the browser does.

The four other major browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) have had years to copy this very useful behavior, and I can't understand why none of them have.

When I used to work at Microsoft, I explicitly requested this behavior on the internal IE8 forums (in beta at the time).

I took several tries to explain why this was important and at the end I got a very typical "Thanks for the feedback" and then the thread went cold. I don't think that PM ever understood what I was talking about, but several other commenters did.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=465086

This close tab behavior would indeed be fantastic if the most important tab behavior use case was "user should be able to close multiple tabs in rapid succession using the mouse." But really, how often would a typical user need to do that?

There may be a good reason to eschew prevailing Mac UI conventions and to put the tab close button on the right, but this isn't one.

I do this often, to clear stale tabs. I'll start from the left (or where I know stale tabs start from) and repeatedly click.

I close tabs after reading them.

I use vimium. I press "t" to open a new tab. When done, I press "d" to close a tab.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgn...

I've never noticed that in safari, since when it stacks my tabs when there is too much, I have to use shortcuts anyway.

I guess what chrome need to fix is the side of the button locating at (right vs left) if Apple did mention that in their "Guidelines".

Other interesting features that amazed me are, i) 'Close tabs to the right' option in right click menu. ii) New tab open behaviour. (New tab goes next to the current tab and not to the end. Extremely useful when you have lots of tabs opened.)

Woah, I just noticed that when the mouse hovers over "Close tabs to the right" or "Close other tabs", the tabs that will close start to flash. (Chrome 9.0.597.67 beta, Windows) When did that happen?

Wow. I just noticed the flash. They've put so much thought in to this.

Along with being Fireballed today, it seems wherever that site is hosted on is currently not returning DNS records for the domain. Shame, as I have yet to see the content and would like to.

A bit off topic, but why can't tabbed browsers detect accidental (double) middle clicks when closing a tab?

Well, it goes both ways. Often, I have a whole lot of tabs open that I want to get rid off so I just rapidly middle-click on the left-most one and keep doing it until they're all gone.

Of course, you can always right-click and say 'Close all tabs to the right' but I usually forget about that option at the time when I'm doing it.

The annoyance lies in the pain to recover a lost tab.

Chrome has a couple good options, fyi: Right-Click tab strip. or Ctrl-Shift-T or List of closed tab at the bottom of the new-tab page.

I close my tabs in chrome how I used to in opera, with a middle click anywhere on the tab control.

Ctrl + W or Ctrl + F4 I'm making it a pledge to teach one non-technical friend a month to use these keyboard shortcuts.

Thank God the red close button is gone.

Fantastic tear down on one of my favorite things about Chrome. I love that I can middle-click tabs away rapidly and they stay the same size.

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