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Comment by socillion | Hacker News Reader

Just to chip in with why I personally refuse to use Chrome:

-A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

-Occasional Flash problems render the browser utterly useless for several minutes before it asks whether I am interested in continuing what I was doing

-Not visiting a tab for a while results in a ridiculous wait for it to load

My screen size makes having multiple rows of tabs simply take up too much screen space.

Honestly, I just haven't had any complaints with firefox (beta channel) apart from the recent interesting decision to change dragging tabs to bookmarks to require hitting ctrl - https://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.apps.firefox/bro...

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You might like Opera. It handles dozens of tabs beautifully, and you can group tabs into collapsible groups so you can both (a) navigate them and (b) see them all on the screen at once without having to scroll.

And put the tab bar on the left, making keeping an overview of 30+ ungrouped tabs no problemo!

Or hide tabs and the tab bar altogether and use CTRL-TAB to toggle through them, like ALT-TAB does windows. Screen real-estate galore:

http://i.imgur.com/XuMkx.png

You don't turn your status bar off? ;)

Haha, that was actually my first thought too when I looked at my pic, which I took months ago. I do now :)

Hm. That's pretty cool.

> -A window begins to be unwieldy at 15 tabs, and is impossible to navigate at 20

Interesting. This is actually one of the big reasons why I prefer Chrome over FF. FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll" while Chrome resizes the tabs to fit.

What about Chrome's implementation do you find more unwieldy than Firefox's?

Tab Groups. For those of us who do lots of research and like to keep it organized it's a godsend.

Right now I have 159 tabs open -- I was curious so I decided to count. If I tried that in Chrome I'm pretty sure it would crash and burn hard, not to mention there would be no ability to keep it organized.

I know there are some research workflows that would allow me to do that as well, but I haven't really taken the time to dive into them after I found tab groups.

I'd like to take a moment to recognize how awful the tab groups UI is.

Hmm, new "Tab Groups" button. Wonder what it does!

http://i.imgur.com/x36TA.png

The only way to figure out that UI, including how to exit back to the browser, is through trial and error or Google. At least tabs/tab groups closed in there (seriously, who adds an "x" to an undo changes button that permanently deletes it instead?) go in "recently closed tabs" now!

http://i.imgur.com/WwnW8.png - a screenshot of Chrome with 20 tabs open. As you can see, determining what each tab contains is rather hard. I agree that scrolling the tab bar (using mousewheel, the UI buttons for that purpose are utterly useless) in Firefox is extremely unwieldy, so the only time I use it is to get to tabs I have at either end. "List all tabs" is an amazing feature, IMO.

I don't know about socillion, but Tree Style Tabs is one of the reasons I won't stop using Firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

Agreed, and I believe the Chromium guys have been asked for this feature and said they won't do it.

I don't think it is possible with chrome extensions either.

You can, however, get tabs in a sidebar, which works well for n <= 30 or so.

about:flags -> Enable Side Tabs

"FF does the whole "make my tab bar scroll""

FYI, you can use the mousewheel to scroll the tabs.. without, it would be horrible

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