“Tabs, tabs, tabs. The specialist subject of UI experts everywhere. Should tabs just rearrange horizontally or also detach? How much vertical scroll buffer should a tab have before it detaches? Under what circumstances should it detach? What about reattaching? This is a short piece concerned only with the different behaviours when closing tabs in Google Chrome, as I think these behaviours are fantastically thought through.”
And you see, I noticed the “delayed resizing” bit, and thought it was a bug (I close tabs with the middle mouse button, so I didn’t notice it was to put the close button on the same place).
This really is a well thought out tab bar anyway.
Ive been using Chrome since the early betas… I did not even notice this until I read this article. However, I realized that I have in fact used this “feature” quite extensively without even knowing it. I often just hit close on the first tab repeatedly when I just want to keep the last tab I opened – I never even realized that something clever was happening.
I tried this same procedure in Firefox with a window-full of tabs open. Repeatedly clicking close on the last tab works fine, but you can’t do the same on the first one.
Anyway, I think that little things like this demonstrate the hidden appeal Chrome seems to have (at least to me), even though feature-wise it is still quite lacking compared to Firefox. When asked why I use it, I can’t really explain it – it just “feels” right.
That’s usually an indication of good usability design (typically, we’re more likely to notice something that *doesn’t* work).
I noticed this a while ago when I had to close like 10 tabs one time, the tabs not resize becomes pretty obvious when they are that small. Since then I’ve been wondering when other browsers would fix their tab behavior to match, this is a nice simple idea that most users can benefit from without even noticing. Small things like this are great and should be easy to copy, so start copying.
I will be a little disappointed if this doesn’t pop up in the next few iterations of firefox.
Why such a fuss over where the little close button is? Middle-clicking *anywhere* in the tab is enough to close it on every browser I have access to (FF, IE8, Chrome, and Safari)…
Touchpads don’t always have middle click, so for those on laptops and netbooks we still have to do thing the old fashioned way. Also better is better, why do things in a inferior manner if you have a better option.
True, I don’t use a laptop often, and don’t tend to have lots of tabs open when I do…
The “delayed resizing” will be useful even with middle clicking. In chrome if you want to close 6 consecutive tabs just go to the first tab and middle click 6 times. Do that with Firefox and you will close some tabs before and after the starting spot due to the unpredictability of resizing.
Might be simple but it makes tab management much easier in Chrome.
Ths is why I use TabMixPkus with firefox – you can enable a close button that is always on the right of the tab bar (not part of the tabs) and keep clicking on it to close tabs.
And the fact that you can use the scroll wheel on a mouse to scroll through the tabs.
Little things like that get the computer out of the way of work.
My favourite UI feature is the scroll-wheel action to move between virtual desktops (if the mouse is over the background) – you can’t do that in Gnome I understand, you have to use a key-press too.
That was the default behavior in Firefox and can be re-enabled from about:config which is the first thing I do after creating a new profile.
I am trying Chrome for Linux now to see how well my html5 pages render on browsers, but I couldn’t care less for the allegedly superior GUI.
I’m not sure that’s actually a good thing – I used to have a broken mouse and when I pressed the close button, the click used to last longer on it – causing other tabs to end up being closed. So I had to press close and immediately yank the mouse away from the tab area. To be made to move the mouse after closing may actually be a good thing, avoids accidents such as double clicking on the close button. Then again, when I use chrome I use ctrl-w so I don’t know how Chrome handles that
Sorry, I like Seamonkey’s tabs a lot better. I especially hate how middle-clicking a link in Chrome opens the tab adjacent to the current one. I also love having the X on the right instead of on each tab.
I guess it’s a matter of personal preference, but that’s one of the specific things I *like* about Chrome. I find it helps to have related tabs grouped together (I currently have 7 FF windows open, with 109 tabs) – opening new tabs next to the current one just means I spend less time rearranging the tabs.
Closing tabs, why would you want to close them all quickly? Let us begin by thinking how we(atleast me) uses tabs. I would guess most people open tabs as background atleast when using right-click open in tab command, I think main goal of tabs was to open something BACKGROUND so you can read it after reading current. Thus why would you want to have ability to quickly close tabs when you by behavior have never read them before activating them? This is highly error prone since double clicking by accident would leave unread tab to closed. That’s why I don’t like Chrome feature, if someone knows how to disable it I would like to know.
I often have several “reference tabs” open while performing a task, next to my primary pane that has my OSNews window always open.
So when I am done researching a task I close close close.
Admittedly I also tend just as frequently to open several browser windows and group related tabs in each window.
So I don’t know… my usage varies.
…why I prefer using Chrome over FF. But it is probably the subtle things about the browser that simply make it more comfortable to use. I use it on Windows exclusively and am using it on linux now as well.
Don’t have an Apple box at the moment, but I am pleased that it has been released on OS X as well.
(Still waiting for the cube to be resurrected in an all-aluminum form – how cool would that be?)