Fulfilling the promise of tabbed browsing

Some Men See Tabbed Browsing As It Is

Let's face it: tabbed browsing is the greatest thing since sliced bread. It's hard to imagine I used to have to open and juggle a new window for every single page. God bless the Firefox team.

But as groundbreaking as Firefox's original version of tabbed browsing was, the Google Chrome browser has managed to improve it in some pretty impressive ways. To name just a few:

• Tabs are located at the top of the window and are much more aesthetically pleasing.
• You can see tabs move as you drag them to rearrange them, giving you something closer to the experience of moving around regular windows.
• Also, when you drag tabs, they snap handily into place in a swift but smooth motion. Nifty.
• Links opened from one window in a new tab open to the right of that tab, not at the end of the tab row. This stack- rather than queue-oriented ordering makes it much easier to keep track of your tabs.
• Tabs can be dragged out of a group to create a new tab group in a new window.
• Similarly, a floating tab in its own window can be dragged and merged into another tab group.

I See Tabbed Browsing As It Never Was...

But there is still much room for improvement. When you're doing heavy browsing or researching, tabs can become difficult to manage as they crowd together on the top bar. This is particularly problematic if you are browsing for several distinct purposes at once. Breaking tabs off into new windows is possible but not easy. There is no way to save a large collection of tabs except to create a new folder and bookmark them all individually into it, or else to force a browser crash and hope the restore point works when you reopen it later.

Google Chrome, then, is actually too attached to the tab as the primary locus of page organization, and hasn't given enough attention to the usefulness of the window. (The same goes for Firefox, but it's far less functional even than Chrome at the moment.) My proposal is that the window should be understood as a means of organizing related groups of tabs, and tabbed browsing should be accommodated to better support the reorganization of tabs into window groups.

The specific features I would like to see in the next version of Chrome tabbed browsing:

1. The drag controls need to be made less sensitive and jerky. I frequently have the experience of tabs popping out of their windows after I click them, as if I had been dragging them when I was not.

2. A first step toward better tab management would be to permit the tabs to be organized into more than one row. The user should be able to drag the bottom border of the tab row like you can on the Windows Taskbar (or optionally have this happen automatically). Instant alleviation of much tab pain. Imagine if you could easily change this:

Into this (visual approximation, of course):

3. There should be a one-click mechanism for saving and reopening an entire window of tabs. Currently you have to create a new folder and invidually bookmark each tab. An added bonus would be if it stored not just a collection of links (as in URLs) but any session state associated with the open tabs. (Chrome may already have this capacity built-in for recently closed tabs.) This would make the function closer to that of preserving an open window without having to leave it open, which would be useful and interwebs-sanity-friendly.

4. It should be very easy to break off groups of tabs into a new window. This is a big pain to do right now, requiring several clicks to drag off each tab and rejoin it to another window. You should be able to:

• Right-click a tab and select "Break this tab into a new window".
• Right-click a tab and select "Break this and tabs to the right into a new window" (or something more succinct).
• Use Ctrl and Shift to select multiple tabs, and either drag them all at once into a new window, or right-click them as a group and select an option to break them into a new window.
• Have tabs broken off from another window start either maximized or not maximized according to their parent. (Currently all broken-off tabs start off non-maximized because they've been dragged.)

5. Similarly, it should be very easy to merge groups of tabs. You should be able to select a single tab, an entire window, or an arbitrary group of tabs and merge it into another window by dragging or through a right-click option.

..And I ask, why not?