[+1] This is Firefox default behaviour. 

(No comment was entered for this change.)

In my opinion, it's much better to have more rows of tabs appear than to scroll. 
Then you can still see everything that is open.  It would also be nice to have the
tabs remember the selection order so that closing a tab takes you back to the tab you
were viewing previously.

As far as I know, no other browsers support tab rows - presumably because they would
take up huge amounts of screen real estate with lots of tabs open. Scrolling tabs are
a much better idea, imho.

How about both modes, like Firefox 3 with Tab Mix Plus?
You can specify the number of rows and if you exceed the number of tabs that can fit 
within these rows, you get n-scrolling rows of tabs.

Yeah, the behaviour needs to be changed, not sure how though. Having them scroll and 
also adding a drop down menu to show all tabs, like in FireFox, might be the best way 
to go. I don't really think multiple lines of tabs is a good idea.

+1 Comment 6 by Sam.Derbyshire

FWIW, Opera has an implementation of multiple tab rows.

A design note: We are hesitant to impose an arbitrary minimum width on tabs. The UI 
in other browsers feels very wrong, especially jarring when you need to switch to 
another kind of UI to manage your tabs. As it stands tabs remain useful until they 
reach a very small size. We will eventually find a way to improve this but I don't 
think what's done in other browsers is the right way just yet.

agree with 4 and 6, perhaps adding a minimum size to each tab... i often get a LOT of 
tabs going, like, more than 40. i just open everything up in a tab and close as i go 
along. lets stuff load in the background and i can deal with it when i get to it. 
Looking at a lot of tiny mountians sort of makes things.... annoying.

I like the way firefox lets you scroll the tabs with the mouse wheel... and i would 
also like to be able to define if the new tabs be added after the current tab or at 
the end of the list.

+1 on comment 6
Firefox gives you a drop-down box where you can see the tab labels, chrome does not 
have that. It's impossible to find a tab when the titles are not visible. A "down 
arrow" type of thing on the right of the "+" might be a good place for this.

There must be sufficient indication *what is in the tab*, nothing arbitrary about 
that. otherwise you may as well demote them to a submenu or scroll them off the side 
because you will lose nothing by doing so.

What should happen then? There should be < and > at either end so you can scroll 
them. No need to reinvent the wheel.

When there are many tabs, a < and > at the ends does not help finding the one tab you   
want to get to.

What about setting a maximum number of tabs per window? If you open one more tab a 
new window is open instead.

I agree, there needs to be scrolling, tabs so narrow they don't display any
information are probably worse than tabs for which you need to scroll to get to.

I disagree with the "open a new window if #tabs > X" suggestion because that could
leave you with a very illogical distribution of tabs over windows. however it would
i think be nice if there was an easy way to split off a large amount of tabs to an
extra window. (for instance by holding ctrl -> clicking a few tabs -> and dragging
all of them out of the window simultaneously. like you would do with files in
windows/linux(/osx?))

A dropdown-list with all tabs would also be nice.

Comment #12 said "No need to reinvent the wheel,". I personally think that there is 
room for a new idea here(Or maybe that's because I have a new idea for the wheel. 
:P). Besides, isn't that what chrome is all about, starting out fresh; trying things 
differently in an experimental way?

I have a few crazy/different ideas.

1: Some kind of dragable and flickable area above the tabs, instead of < and > 
arrows. This way it'll be more responsive to navigate this virtual plan and wont take 
much thought for the user, it wont be intrusive. I've never liked the arrows in 
firefox because it felt like clicking several times to get to the tab that you want 
takes more clicks then it should. Of course this drag area doesn't have to be visible 
at all times. For example, in a maximized window it can only be visible when you 
place your cursor at the very top pixels of the screen.

2: Another idea I had in mind was some kind of visual layout that gives a wide, 
clear, scope of all the tabs we have up. A while back when a version of Safari came 
out for windows I thought that it would be cool to have coverflow in as tabs, but 
that would be pointless eyecandy. But sense chrome stores thumbnails of websites on 
your local drive then this is could be possible.
 Coverflow would be a little to intense, for slower computers, so maybe a thumbnail 
view of some kind with the title above the thumbnail in the tab. Just another idea.

3: Comment #14 mentioned a maximum number of tabs per window, which is an idea I had 
in mind also. But when a window is full the + button could change into a button which 
says full and when you click that it'll open a new window, or something like that. 
This idea isn't so great though because some people will want to have all their tabs 
scrunched into one window, rather then clutter their taskbar.

My point though is that it should be played with to find the most intuitive route 
that will fit most everyones browsing experience. That's agreeable right?

Agree with ben at comment 9, not having scroll is a feature, not a bug.

Firefox has a bad default, but at least they made it a user preference, here is the 
first thing I do on fresh installations of firefox:

about:config
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth = 12
browser.tabs.closeButton = 3

In the case of the second line, Chrome also have the same bad default, but that is a 
different bug :)

Although I appreciate the attraction of not having a minimum tab width, there's 
another piece of UI that gets lost when the tab width is narrow enough - the page 
loading indication doesn't get shown for the current tab if there is only enough room 
for the X.

In my humble opinion, there is a better way to fix this.  I have my tabs organized in
a hierarchy (or tree) structure (Tree Style Tab extension for FF 3), and instead of
on the top they are on the left side of the browser.  All new tabs that you open by
way of links in the current page will be indented and become children tabs of the
current tab.  You can expand / collapse trees at will (and under intuitive
circumstances it is done automatically).  This way you don't need to have all of your
tabs visible at once.  I've had over one hundred tabs open at once without the need
for any scrolling, or resizing of the tabs, and it still didn't feel cluttered.

I opened a feature request for this style of tabs to be an option instead of the
normal (and imho outdated) model.  It's here:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2319

Some ideas:

1. Let the tabs get tiny but enlarge the one currently under the mouse cursor. You 
can drag your mouse across the tab bar to see all the tabs, one by one. As a 
variation, you could make the tabs gradually enlarge as the mouse comes closer, like 
the OSX dock. If the mouse is not over the tab bar, enlarge the current tab. When the 
tabs get really tiny, get rid of the edges and just show a row of icons. If the icons 
alone don't even fit on the screen, shrink them (but enlarge them when their tab 
enlarges).

2. Allow multiple rows of tabs but only show the row containing the current tab. When 
the mouse enters the tab bar, show all the rows, but keep the current row at the top 
(so it doesn't move). When the mouse moves off the tab bar, hide the rows that don't 
contain the current tab. Instead of completely hiding rows, you could overlap them, 
so just the tops of the hidden rows are visible. This gives a visual indication that 
there are hidden rows but then the current row has to be at the bottom and it will 
move when the mouse comes near it. Generally not good to have clickable things move 
when you go to click on them.

3. After the tabs get squished to a certain point, switch to a vertical tab bar. It 
will be rather jarring to have the whole UI paradigm suddenly switch but it's the 
most practical option. I don't know why someone would want to have 40 tabs open and 
not go vertical. Maybe I'm just biased because I use vertical tabs all the time. At 
least, I did in Firefox :(

i'd love to see scroll arrows show up which you don't need to click but MouseOver to 
scroll

Good idea! I vote for Firefox like behavior (scrollable tabs and arrow button) with 
some corrections:

1. No need to press on < or > to scroll tabs - let it be just MouseOver with 
adjustable speed (MouseDown should work too, for PDA for example).
2. Tabs in a popup list should be sorted by time they have been accessed
3. Ctrl+Tab should not select all tabs by they order, it is stupid, I have 50 pages 
opened and only 5 really active. It should select most recent tabs first, so it will 
be possible to switch between two-three pages I work with having many other pages 
still opened.

It will be ideal browser if you implement this.

*Replicated: Please Confirm Issue*

I like idea 1 from figaro1111.  Similar to Ipod Touch. Also, as far as coverflow or 
thumbnails, (figaro1111) I think it would be nice and maybe add an option for the 
user to change which feature based on the user's memory.
Another good idea would be the combination of idea 1 by jedediah and progame.  Also, 
a good idea would be scroll on mouseover, but scroll faster if clicked.

There is something else that goes to this subject and this is the Arrow that shows if  
you have some downloads on the page. 

When there are many opened tabs this arrow goes out of the first tab. 
See attached file.

	sd.jpg 35.8 KB   View   Download

You may be interested in a recent blog post about tabs in Chrome.

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/01/tabbed-browsing-in-google-chrome.html

 Issue 6227  has been merged into this issue.

Running 2.0.157.0 on Vista, Dual Monitors. Monitor #2 is rotated 90 degrees CCW. Only 
happens when Chrome is in a maximized state. Does not happen on monitor #1. 

	ChromeTabOverflow.JPG 18.4 KB   View   Download

I for one dislike lists, perhaps you could have an option as to the default behavior.
 Personally, I'd like tabs to be scrollable.

 Issue 5566  has been merged into this issue.

32-bit Vista. Only happens when maximized.

I'm totally agree with Comment 11.

In addition to scrollable tabs area we need to view tabs title not only by hovering 
mouse on it. I suggest you to add tabs list functionality to right click event of 
"+".

I think that ideas in comments 20 and 22 are excellent. I don't like scrolling tabs.

I posted on the Chromium blog a while back about this:

http://blog.chromium.org/2009/01/tabbed-browsing-in-google-chrome.html#c2234841374545598907

I've finally got round to doing a quick mockup of my ideas. (See attachment link below)

Note: hub tabs are tabs from which other "spoke" tabs have been opened using the
"open link in new tab" context menu or by ctrl clicking on links. (refer the Ordering
section in the main blog post linked to above for a description of how hub tabs
currently work in chrome.)

Obviously with only 8 tabs it doesn't show much of a space saving, but with more tabs
open it would allow much more space for the tabs in the current group of tabs than
having all tabs the same size.

	Chrome UI Tab Bar.png 54.2 KB   View   Download

I like the hub and spoke idea, 

how would they be automatically assigned though? in a similar way to how IE8 colours
its tabs?

ddragoon: hub tabs are already part of the current chrome, it's the reason it
switches to the right tab when you close a tab instead going back to the previous tab
you were on. See the description of it in this blog post under the "Ordering"
heading: http://blog.chromium.org/2009/01/tabbed-browsing-in-google-chrome.html

I was more talking about the sizing of spoke tabs. IE say I opened a load of tabs
from a google reader tab, the google reader tab would stay prominent and the articles
I middle clicked would stay as 'minimised' spoke tabs when I clicked away to another
hub (for example a forum or something)

There could be tabs that "drop down". Like, windows merges many windows of the same 
program in groups. Chrome could merge many tabs of the same website in groups, also. 

We will be doing this as part of the UI fixit. Cole is mocking up some UI for this. 
Assigning to Glen in the meantime.

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(No comment was entered for this change.)

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Hmm, I've read through most, not all of the comments here. Here are a couple of
thoughts about a potential way of opening tabs.

If there is a "hub" page from which you tend to open all your tabs (say, iGoogle),
each new tab opens after the previous one. So,

Hub | Tab1 | Tab2 | Tab 3 .... | Tab n (In order of opening time).

Might it make sense to reverse this, such that the latest tab was opened first, and
successive ones are *prefixed* rather than suffixed to the original tab? 

Hub | Tab n | Tab n-1 |  .... | Tab 1 (In reverse order of opening time). 

This solves the hierarchy aspect since you know that all tabs opened from the hub
start near the original one. Coupled with some sort of scrolling - I personally would
find it pretty useful!

 Issue 12300  has been merged into this issue.

About the tab listing, how about borrowing safari tab list style? It highlights the tabs that visible 
at the current window.
(Seems that the release version of Safari 4 is taking different approach. The beta, featuring tabs on 
top, is the one that is taken for this example)

Another thing, is to have the tab list access under the tab's context menu (At least inside another 
level) with similar listing view as above [attachment, bar #4]. May also available when the add tab got 
click-hold [bar #3].

Having the list inside the application context menu (the one that's having access to task manager) may 
also increase productivity, such as restoring window at the specific tab [bottom].

	chrome-tabs.png 143 KB   View   Download

How about having the ability to search the omnibox for the open tabs? Or having them collapse into an alphabetical tab just like searching multiple folders in the paper 
world - or better yet, collapse them into similar root sites (into the ones that are 
highlighted as black in the omnibox.)

ah! I missed that one
And to differentiate, use keyword 'tab' or something similar to force searching the tabs

*But one thing about consistency: is it ok for omnibox to find the tabs?
I was reading the chrome comics a few days ago, and get the idea that "the address bar is now owned by its 
own tab" (just checked, page 19). So I was thinking it was quite 'out' for a soldier to investigate its 
officers.

**In the other way, well, the 'soldier' is an omnibox, that it should be able to do anything.

I'm in favour of the Firefox-style of horizontal tab scrolling with a drop down list
of tabs to the right (although I don't like the way Firefox scrolls the tabs).

Workspaces are another thing to keep in mind when making changes to the tab system.
See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505214.

My long comment got erased. Btw, I like the drawer suggestion in glen.84's post. Here's 
the link http://design-challenge.mozilla.com/summer09/index.html. 

Here's another suggestion. Attached is a rough photoshop sketch of a scroll bar type 
navigation for the tabs. Its very rough and a lot of improvement can be made.

	scrollbar.jpg 55.1 KB   View   Download

How about a system where the tabs, just like now, shrink to make room for more tabs. 
Then smoothly grow when the mouse gets near, much like various docks do 
(http://rocketdock.com/), except only the width should change.
If all tabs doesn't fit, they should scroll sideways (equally smooth), perhaps with 
some arrows or other indicators at the sides of the tab bar, indicating that more tabs 
is in that direction.

One thing I've found is that when I have a tab explosion, usually _most_ of the tabs 
are just throwaway pages I want to read and then close and never look at again; they 
are essentially temporary bookmarks.

Compare to, for example, my gmail, google reader, igoogle, twitter, etc tabs which I 
switch between and want to be always available to me and ready to use.

On my laptop, tab explosions usually result in everything slowing to a crawl, which 
is annoying. Each tab is ready to go at a moment's notice, the cost of which is that 
all of my RAM is eaten up.

What I think would be nice, now that there is a tab pinning mechanism (at least on 
Linux -- right click on the tab > "Pin tab") is that all "unpinned" tabs over a 
certain amount (say, 5 -- may depend on window width) get dumped into an "archive" 
dropdown menu similar to what Firefox has now. Tabs in the archive are unloaded from 
memory (but maybe cached on the disk) and are essentially just bookmarks. Opening any 
of the tabs in the archive moves it to the 5 or so active tabs and moves the 
rightmost active tab to the archive. When a tab is pushed off the end into the 
archive, the arrow button should flash orange/red for a moment (or jump up and down 
or something) to call attention to it) and the tab going into the archive should be 
smoothly animated into the button.

I don't know how that would work for everyone though. I don't know if having your 
tabs unloaded involuntarily would be a good user experience. I'd be happy to 
implement this type of system as an extension, but I'm not sure that extensions will 
be given enough control over things like that as it is now.

Crude mock attached.

	tab_explosion.png 149 KB   View   Download

CalebEgg, your suggestion is more about handling many open sessions in the Chrome in 
the entire system, rather than about visually fitting several tabs in a single window.

Re your idea: consider starring  Issue 11984 , it's much the same to what you propose.

Hi here's another idea. It will still use the original UI but change once the tabs 
exceeds the number of allowable opened tabs (Labels that gives hints to what it 
contains). So instead of creating a new window (which is hard to navigate)this design 
will create a new parent "tab" that can be renamed, moved and separated into a new 
window of tabs.

	BrowserTabs.jpg 39.0 KB   View   Download

-1!  I wish I could vote against an issue.  I really prefer the current behavior.  I 
guess you can categorize the fixes in 3 categories.

1.  Take up more screen real estate with more tabs.
2.  Hide tabs and require clicking to get to them.
3.  Leave it as is, constant screen real estate, can get to all tabs with 1 click.

I do think that squishing the tabs extremely small does look unprofessional, but I 
don't think there's a better solution.

Hi, great idea though I think this problem was solved with the release of beta 
3.0.195.6. What they did was not to disable the add-new-tab button.

Manual (or semi-automatic) tab grouping would help here too. So I can say - here are 
my social sites (personal mail, reader, facebook, etc.) here are my sites relating to 
project 1 (some docs, bugs, etc.) and so on. Tabs opened within the group stay in the 
group, groups can be named, saved, collapsed, juggled around, degrouped ,regrouped, 
etc.

Whatever the solution is, please no scrolling tab bar.

(re)Vote for non-scrolling

Regarding #58,
Also consider the faviconize addon @ firefox. That saves space a lot! (And maybe do 
some confirmation if the site didn't have favicon.)
Link: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3780

The classic solution to the "too many elements" problem is grouping & nesting. The 
ability to nest tabs would be really useful. Very often the tabs I'm working with are 
associated in some manner, and if there is a hierarchical relationship, I should be 
able to just move one tab "under" another. 

At a later point, this could become semi-automated, with tabs that were opened from 
the active tab X appearing "under" the active tab (if there are too many tabs open).

Note that "under" doesn't have to mean "always visible". I'm thinking of something 
very similar to the start menu on non-mac desktop environments, except horizontally 
situated instead of vertically situated.

If only it would be easier to move between windows, and if Google Chrome allows 
multiple tabs to be moved to a new or existing window instantaneously, then I would 
find it less of a problem when organizing my tabs and browsing experience.

I like the nesting idea, another solution (though it will still be overloaded at a
certain point) is to just show the Favicon of a tab (or at least be able to set a tab
that way) because I know my Gmail/GReader/AddictingGames/Lifehacker favicons, that
would be a nice feature, maybe say that certain URLs always show up this way, while
others don't.

Another possibility for browsing navigation and organization is the solution in 
OneNote 2007. They have tabs in the top, and both right and left sides. Maybe we  
can make the side tabs dissappear or reappear. We can also rename the tabs and 
search for it in the omnibox.

It would also be great if we can save the whole browsing session like a file that we 
can double click in the desktop to open and Google Chrome would instantly load the 
previous session instead of waiting for the numerous sites to load again. Then if 
someone wants to update the site, they just have to refresh the site. This would 
greatly benefit those with slow connections.

How about the implementation seen in Safari 4 Beta?  (It was taken out in the final release of Safari 4, but it's 
essentially a shifting view of where you are in the entire row of tabs, as highlighted in white in the spill-out 
menu on the right.)

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_QdU9uvAk5ag/ShxurvoITPI/AAAAAAAAC5E/SFK87NMcdVo/s1600-
h/screentabsfestsafarimac.png

@gordeon I like your idea, but I don't like having to take multiple clicks to get
where I want to be. Yes it keeps it compact, but doesn't seem like the best plan. I
will put out my idea again to selectively (or automatically via preference) only show
favicons, but a tooltip on hover w/ title.

I would just like for it to be like when I could set my own tab overflow settings in Firefox. I personally would set 
my Chrome to fit tabs on the top bar until the favicons couldn't fit, and then when that happened, start a second 
row. 

(No comment was entered for this change.)

I want to say: "Thank you!" Pinning tabs has now been implemented via Right Click!

Ok, the right-click "Pin Tab" option is cool, i suppose? But it doesn't solve this 
issue. Which is the problem with overflow. Now I can pin tabs, but at the cost of 
completely losing the ability to select the right-most tabs that I have open, save for 
selecting the farthest one i can click on, and then CTRL+PGUP'ing to the other tabs I 
can now no longer see.

Neat feature. But I would hardly call this a fix for this specific issue. Which I'm 
guessing it was not meant to address this issue.

Yeah, I know it's not a complete fix, but it at least lets me see more information on 
other tabs, since I don't really need the title of my Gmail tab (which is open all the 
time)

(No comment was entered for this change.)

I also like the idea of nested tabs - i.e. hover over a particular tab and a drop-
down list appears containing other tabs opened from within that tab.

Another idea would be to have a multi-row tab bar, where only the row with your 
current tab is displayed until you hover over the tabs with the mouse. This would 
expand the tab bar into multi-row mode, allowing you to easily pick the tab you 
require.

A minimum tab size is also definitely required, as identifying the tab you need is 
vital.

Maybe its possible to add multiple tab-rows without compromising workspace. We can do 
this by showing only the current tab-row and when it overflows a "down", "up" and "all" 
buttons will appear. Clicking the "down" button would album flip it to the next tab-row  
(as well as with the "up" button) while maintaining the workspace allocated for tab 
navigation. And when the "all" button is clicked, a new-all-opened-tab page will appear 
with thumbnails of the currently opened tabs (similar to the new-tab page).

Additional Comment: Maybe we could also design the new-all-opened-tab page to have 
organizational tools like pinning, categorizing, labeling, group-selecting and moving 
and closing.

 Issue 23792  has been merged into this issue.

thanks

I like the idea of #20. When I open a lot of tabs from 1 pages (same domain), I would 
like Chromium to be able to regroup them in some way (IE does that by color, but 
regrouping or stacking could be well.
As #61 I am frustrated by the fact tabs have to be moved 1 by 1. I propose that if a 
window becomes unable to display favicons on tabs a new option in context menu of 
tabs propose to split the window (all tabs before the tab in a first window and the 
next ones in a new window).

61 20

i disagree with #20 and #77 i think tabs should not be grouped togethar because i 
rarely open more than 4 tabs from the same website. I think if this functionality is 
built in it should be optional or an add-on

About #20, the implementation was also in opera, only per window basis.
I think its good to try (add) tab on the side as a new UI model. As for multi-row tab, 
there's a disadvantage for it in widescreen, that is reducing the viewport's height.

That's only a disadvantage for wide-screen if the multi-row tab bar is pinned down. Not 
if it's one row, and the other rows are auto-hidden until you mouse over them like what 
was talked about earlier in the second paragraph of comment 71.

It seems that most people do not recognize that most Windows user are already using 
multi-row tabs. We just call it by different name - Tabs and Windows. And their 
location are just separate - one at the top and the other in the Windows Taskbar.

If we could only consolidate the two rows then there would be no compromise in screen 
estate. That'll probably come when Chrome OS comes, but for the meantime, auto-hide 
multi-row tabs is ok with me. But maybe we can make it more creative than just that.

Likin' the idea ianpatrickco.  Maybe, for Windows7, the ability to show each tab as
it's own "window" on mouse over in the taskbar (with option for Flip3d and Alt+Tab),
but once too many are open, it would take up too much space, and may be a nuiscance
anyway. Maybe it could just be a list of favicons that would change it and become
visible on mouse over.  But the tab strip has to remain an option for XP/Vista and
those who just can't get used to going to the taskbar. But you are right, they should
be integrated to work more effectively.

I don't understand - the whole idea of having a tab bar is to remove items from the
taskbar, is it not?

The idea that once the tab bar is full it overflows into a new window in the task bar
isn't bad, but presumably some sort of extendible tab bar would be better.

If I understand correctly the above poster wants to have previews of open tabs when u
hover over Firefox in the taskbar. That sounds good, although it would become
cumbersome, however isn't that a separate issue?

I still believe a simple hover gesture to reveal multiple tab rows is a good option,
and would fit with the current interface.

Well, you see, the idea in Win7 is that you have one icon on the taskbar regardless
of how many windows are open.  I think this could be applied to tabs as well. See the
below photo. http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2009/01/peek.png The
only drawback is that this would essentially turn them all into separate windows.

I think the behavior should be the same in all OS's. Meaning that the solution for 
this issue should be completely separated from what win7 does.

Valid point. I have noticed that IE8 Does this though.  Good news (for me) here though!
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=6337
and
http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10374965-12.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheDownloadBlog

I'm no artist, but I made a small animation of what I'm thinking. (See attached file)

	Chrome-Tabs.gif 16.3 KB   View   Download

Good animation, but in actuality, the second row should extend all the way to the end
of the page, Users should also be able to decide at what size (or number) tabs should
move to a secondary row.

I agree with chuff13579 and synderxc - that was pretty close to what I was thinking,
although mine took a hint from windows 7, and I had pictured thumbnail previews. 
Thoughts on that?

I agree with Chuff13579 and snyderxc. Thumbs up!

Wow, just thinking about it, this was the *188th* Issue posted out of, I don't know
NEARLY 25,0000! This really needs to be worked out.

Regarding comment #49, maybe we can add a "glowing" effect on the tabs while being 
typed in the omnibox. This will solve the "same-websites-being-opened-multiple-times-
because-I-forgot-there-is-already-one-that-is-opened-since-I-can't-see-the-favicon" 
issue.

Check this video out: http://vimeo.com/6712657 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7soM07Y3qNI&feature=player_embedded 
They are both great ideas for organizing windows/tabs. The second video is ideal for Smart Phones or devices with touch 
screens. Instead of application icons, we can use thumbnails of open tabs. And it doesn't end there, we could also make 
it into an infinite zoom out layout! Where it starts from the smallest to the specific. GOODBYE SCROLLS!

We can also push the idea further by utilizing the omnibox to search the thumbnails and give it a glowing effect.

Greatly enjoyed the Vimeo Link, although, I'm not sure how well it would work applied to a single app. For the YouTube, it won't do well.  It may be a 
nice feature option, but it requires multiple clicks to get where you want to go.  I want as few clicks as is possible to reach my destination, plus 
it still doesn't answer the question of where to put tabs. Will they just keep going until off the screen or at 1 pixel visibility?  These are the key 
things.
1. One click navigation
2. Highly visible (and readable) tabs
3. Quick access for the end user.

Now for a bizarre suggestion. Wrap around tabbing.  I have attached a (poorly done) design of it and attached it.  Of course, in the real thing, tabs 
won't overlap, and it will look better, I have also put in the idea of tab previews on mouse over, since titles would hide. I also include the title 
in the mouse over (except, as an after thought, the title should be under the thumbnail.

	Capture.PNG 520 KB   View   Download

Nice feedback. For the Vimeo Link, imagine as if the app icons were the thumbnails of 
the opened tabs, it would be the perfect solution! We could implement it in the NNTP 
(2 clicks) or in a new tab that we could call Opened Tab Page (OTP) (2 clicks). 

Nevertheless, I think we are not grounded in reality if we would say that it is 
possible to create a "One Click Navigation" without compromising Chrome's small 
screen footprint. Although a work around exist by using an auto-hide-multiple-tab-
rows solution (comment #87), I don't think that the solution is ideal given that:

1.) We don't want it to be drop down (comment #27)
2.) nor to be scrolling (comment #27)

Auto-hide was my previous ideal solution until I realize that it is the perfect 
marriage of two of our browsing navigation pet peeves (scrolling and drop down). It 
would surely end up looking like Windows XP's auto-hide task bar (My eyes! It 
hurts!). 

So instead of auto-hide, maybe we could keep the simple one tab row, and just add 
additional OTP navigation button similar to the NNTP button. 

The proposed OTP navigation page would act like the NNTP except that it will be the 
directory of all opened tabs. Also it will fit all opened tabs' thumbnails (similar 
to attachment) in one screen - so there is no need for scrolling or using drop down 
menu. 

We could also combine the OTP with the NNTP if we want to keep only one button next 
to the tabs (while still having two click navigation). The current tab row behavior 
would prevail if the tabs do not overflow. Clicking on one set of thumbnails in the 
OTP would transition the current tabs' row into the selected tabs' row.

	Small Thumbnails.jpg 77.4 KB   View   Download

meh.

@GraemeErickson: Please refrain from useless comments.  I like the idea of an OTP,
but once they get to a certain size, it would have to turn to a scrolling page or a
drag over style (like iPhone).  Also, if they get really small, a mouseover larger
preview of the page would be ideal, but as mentioned, I really can't wait for Chrome
to have the IE8 in Win7 style taskbar mouseover that shows all the tabs!

 Issue 13592  has been merged into this issue.

Nice input, snyderxc. The mouse-over preview of what the tab holds is a great 
suggestion. 

Additionally, I believe it'll takes a hundred Chromeviews (Dynamic Chrome tabs' 
thumbnails) to cover the whole screen in the Open Tab Page (OTP) and make it really 
small. 

MOUSE-OVER a Chromeview and a larger preview of the site appears along side 
additional site information such as Name, Security certificate, Site date-stamp, 
Memory and CPU usage and many more.

Best of all, browsing options appear when the Chromeview is CLICKED such as Create 
Application Shortcut, Open in new window/tab, Highlight similar sites, Share, Save 
session, Refresh... and you name it! These options appear with the preview and sports 
their very own button logos.

Moreover, DOUBLE CLICK the thumbnail and one zips directly to the open tab. Use the 
omnibox to search and highlight the Chromeviews so you'll never need to load the 
forgotten-already-opened-site again. (Omnibox still retains its current functionality 
but adds the Chromeview highlight.)

The OTP serves as a better solution to a Win7 style taskbar that would work across 
platforms. 

OTP - All tabs just a click away.

Awesome idea ianpatrickco, but I think a single click should go to the tab, and a right 
click or cmd+click should bring up the menu you suggested. I think it will be more 
intuitive that way.

Hi, for those who are using Windows 7, I found a way to better navigate between 
Chrome Windows. One must first position the task bar at the top of the screen and 
auto-hide it. This will make Chrome's multiple windows easier to access without 
having to go up and down the screen. This is similar to snyderxc's single button idea 
plus Jedediah's autohide suggestion.

This will also allow one to open multiple windows and utilize Window 7's aero peak 
preview (excluding the tabs). Also when you right-click on the Chrome's shortcut, 
tasks such as open new or incognito window and recently visited websites appear 
giving us instant access to commonly used commands. 

I think these features adds value to Chrome and should be made as integral part of 
Chrome for the sake of XP users. Maybe we could add these features in the new tab 
button. (hover [3 sec delay] would show previews of open tabs and open windows and 
right click would show recently visited websites)

Sadly, there is a bug that would prevent the auto-hide taskbar to appear every time I 
would hover over it. I think it can be solve by having a one pixel space between the 
top of the screen and the top of Chrome. 

Try it out! Be open and see how other worlds operate to better improve our own world.

 Issue 29030  has been merged into this issue.

Hi guys, check out the Vertical Tabs via Chrome Extensions. I think the main problem is 
solved.

P.S. I just wish there was a close button next to the web titles.

Also check out the TabSearch by stephen.heron in the extensions. It even has a tab 
search functionality just as some of us have suggested in the Omnibar.

 Issue 29706  has been merged into this issue.

I've been reading through many of the comments and one thing that strikes me is many of the solutions are 
adding features when Chrome seems to be about stripped-down speed and productivity. Also, many of the 
solutions have inherit issues that make them cause more problems than they solve.

Horizontal rows build up and take away vertical space, which is where you can least afford to lose it on a 
display. You'd have to resort to scrolling eventually anyway so why bother with multiple rows? Why not 
simplify and add some manner of scrolling to start?

Vertical bookmarks take up a lot of space and given that a significant portion of users are still using 1,024-
pixels wide displays when most websites tend to be static and approximately 960 pixels wide taking away 
much from either side of a page could result in a horizontal scroll-bar on many sites. Also, there would be a 
substantial visual jarring when you went from one tab to multiple or in the reverse.

Thumbnails is an interesting addition but it does not solve the root issue which is an inability to find the tab 
you're looking for. While thumbnails are handy if you can visually recognize a site what about when you have 
multiple pages open that are nearly identical or, even worse, where you've never been to the sites and have no 
idea what they look like? Besides, this feels more like a gimmick and less like a UX solution given the issues 
with it.

I'm not sure why people have issues with a horizontal tab-bar that, when it reaches a certain width, scrolls in 
some manner. This is the standard method for every other major browser and thus what users expect anyway. 
It doesn't suffer from the issues any of the other proposed options have.

I think a minimum width can't be avoided, if only for usability reasons. As has already been said when the 
tabs get too thin you can't tell which tabs have loaded, which are loading, which have crashed and so on. Also, 
were you to have many tabs where all the text was obscured you'd have to hover over a tiny area in order to 
get the tooltip to see what the tab is. This last piece alone is enough to be a black mark against not having a 
minimum width as any user who has issues with fine movements is going to find this exceedingly difficult.

It feels as if some of the proposed solutions are ignoring serious usability issues. One of the things I like most 
about Chrome is that much of it is very simple and user-friendly. It feels like user actions have been 
thoroughly taken into account to find the best solution for the average user.

Area-UI-Features label replaces Area-BrowserUI label

@106 Absolutely all the way. One thing extra: leaving this issue for a year without 
ANY solution is ABSOLUTELY unthinkable to me. We users don't care about "The right 
way", if there is no way, than ANY way is better!! Please please please add scrolling 
or list or new row or around-the-edge tabs or something! If you do implement 
scrolling please have a user-configurable "scroll x" button that will scroll by a 
user defined number of tabs, where that number would (optimally) be either a % of 
tabs (in that direction) to scroll by, or a fixed variable (fixed by browser width or 
tabs visible). It is obvious that this has been a continual issue. Chrome is going in 
the right direction. Let it default to no scrolling, but in the interest of sensible 
tab management, let there be something, over nothing, any day this would be 
infinitely more frustrating than not being able to navigate open tabs, but not much 
more frustrating than waiting for firefox to scroll at an aggravatingly fixed rate. 
is there an about:objects key that toggles overflow? Act now!

I still think the simplest solution would be to have several rows and just hide them 
until the user hovers over the tab bar. That way, when looking for a tab the user can 
see them all at the same time. Also, at this point the user wouldn't care about 
vertical screen space, because they're looking for a tab.

@109: Having multiple rows would be perfectly fine if only one row was shown at a time. In fashion multiple 
rows might actually be preferable to a scrolling list because all are shown at once. However, a scrolling list might 
be quicker to navigate or scan.

Does anyone have any usability on which is more scannable? I have a single column is but that's just my initial 
suspicion.

 Issue 33712  has been merged into this issue.

There are lots of extensions out there that provides usability for finding tabs and 
solving this problem. One of which allows us to search for tabs by typing. Please check 
tabsearch in the extension gallery and share to us your opinions.

I personally don't like Firefox's scrolling solution because I need multiple clicks to 
go to the tab that I need to go to. To solve this, one of my suggestion is to implement 
the tab search functionality in the omni-box. Searching the tabs thru the omnibar is a 
maverick solution that no browser has ever tried before. And with the extension 
tabsearch, we can already visualize how it can work best.

Leaving this problem for 1 year do has its benefits. It allows the community to 
brainstorm and to look for other solutions that will benefit both users and other 
browsers as well. 

Besides, I don't think the core team is not thinking for solutions, we can already see 
tab search functionality in the Chrome OS demo. Head over the Chrome OS UI site for more in depth detail.

Another thing you have to consider is that, regardless of what solution we end up using, the tab in focus acts as 
the title bar.  I figure this is why other browsers set a minimum width for tabs so that the title text is still 
readable.  This is particularly important in Chrome with its absence of the traditional global title bar.

(No comment was entered for this change.)

(No comment was entered for this change.)

Hopefully this can be fixed soon...

 Issue 40309  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 42515  has been merged into this issue.

@gordeon I think Google Chrome has a global title bar in the form of the Omnibar.

My opinion:

	a.PNG 41.1 KB   View   Download

There's currently an overflow bug with opening new tabs when you get to about 56 open
tabs.  New tabs will overlap the + button and eventually go off the screen where they
cannot be accessed.

	screenshot-20100505-222059.png 75.2 KB   View   Download

#64 seems like a very nice solution. It solves the big problem with an overflow button 
(the loss of "context"), and would also IMO introduce the freedom to give the current 
tab a wider button so we could actually see the damn title. 

Wow, two years on the problem, must be a hard one.

I support Chrome and all that, but I don;t understand the stubbornness to not let people use what they have been using for years. 
It's basic stuff, like the TITLE in a webpage, which is very importat to a lot of people, and is currently unusable; or the ability to use more than 7 
tabs, when I'm SURE some of you developers have this problem yourselves.


Why not give as a simple option to have scrolling tabs or multi-row, like all the other damn programs. Fine, default it to the current shrinking-
tab-behavior, I don't care, just let us browse a few tabs at once please.

Thank you.

Ok, master developers! If you don't want to include scrollable tabs as default feature, make it optional! Allow user to choose!

maybe when side tabs will be available this should be fixed with auto switch to side tabs with n° of tabs open greater than a certain number...

I prefer the current behaviour - in general if I have a lot of tabs open I know around about where the one I want is. Scrolling tabs make it hard to quickly open a tab in the vicinity of the one I am looking for.

Multiple rows take up too much space in my opinion.

The biggest issue with scrolling tabs is they give you no sense of where in the row of tabs you are. To help visualise this open chrome as a non-maximised window. In this view there is a gap between the top of the tabs and the top of the window. I think a thin (3 or 4 pixels high) bar above the tabs with a shaded section would solve this. The shaded section should indicate the region of tabs you can see in the tab bar. Clicking anywhere on the bar should open the tab that corresponds to that point. Obviously the shaded section will move to show the new region of tabs you can see. The number of tabs you can see at any one time should be an option.

The only issue with this is that when chrome is maximised there is no space between the top of the tabs and the top of the window, it might be worth squeezing the UI elements at the top a bit to fit this in or just shifting them down. I think the benefits outweigh the small amount of extra screen real estate it requires.

New Tab concept from Firefox - they call it Tab Candy: http://vimeo.com/13560319
I think we can make something better than that and call it Tab Google =)

 Issue 50343  has been merged into this issue.

Ok if you guys watched this http://vimeo.com/13560319 from firefox, you'll find out that it's basically a compilation of most of the suggestions here as well as more.

Anyway, due to boredom, I decided to make a new mock up with some of Tab Candy's feature. Please refer to the attached image:

1. Assume that you can only fit four (4) tabs in one window. This is to simplify the 60 or less tab limitation.

2. You wanted to group the tab into groups to better manage your workplace. Instead of dragging your tabs out into a new window, now you simply drop them into your existing desired "mother" tab. 

3. To push the idea further, instead of you manually grouping the tabs, how about if Google Chrome automatically groups tabs based on it's mother (from where it was born - or where the link was clicked on)if it exceeds the maximum allowable tab number.

When the number of child tabs grows large, it simply turns into a "group of tabs" single tab where it will expand or fan out when the mouse is over. Users can also simply drag it out and it'll turn into a Window with tabs. This would be similar to Firefox's alpha tab candy.

4. Like in Tab Candy, you can rename the "mother" tab. However, we would go a step further by allowing users to search the mother tab using the omni bar. In order to search mother tabs, the user would have to add the following advance search tags in the omnitab:

gtab:<group_tab_name>
tab:<tab_name>

When users search using this, the firefox tab candy mode will come into play and show a search result while at the same time adds a glowing shine to the tab - similar to Apple Dock's Interface.


Extra notes: The mother tabs themselves group together if they exceed the limitation.

	Tabs within Tabs.jpg 305 KB   View   Download

How about the idea of being able to group tabs. basically folders of tabs.
so on left would be a row of folders, this row would have an expand and minimize button.
u click the folder and on top the tabs change to whats in the folder,
allowing you to cluster tabs,
meaning u could throw social tabs in one folder, mail in another,
and 20+ or w/e quick reads in another,
if u want to close your quick reads, you'd right click the folder they are in and choose close.

 Issue 50501  has been merged into this issue.

@cutiecash I think the folder concept has already been implemented on the bookmark section.

I definitely think the way to is just add a drop-down menu to the end of the tab bar; there's no need to over complicate the solution to this one.

I am working with the design leads to find a solution to this.

I love the idea in comment #22 point 1. 

I really think it's most in line with the Chrome simplicity ethos. 

It requires the least amount of steps in terms of user interaction. 

It'd require the least amount of addition to the user interface (or none, really), and I personally think it would be the most visually attractive.

Just an addendum to the above: The user isn't doing anything new that they weren't already doing anyway, i.e. hovering over the tab bar. So it's quite intuitive - the tab width simply expands on hover and shrinks to normal on mouse out, with the active tab widened by default.

One possible issue would be how this interferes with the closing of tabs, because tab widths change when this happens (as explained at http://blog.chromium.org/2009/01/tabbed-browsing-in-google-chrome.html under the heading "Cleaning Up"). Perhaps the only option here would be to switch to uniform width temporarily when in "tab-closing mode"?

One more thing - in the event of scrolling tabs, it might be useful for this to happen on hover as well, according to where along the tab bar the cursor is. Again, no new interface elements needed, and the user doesn't need to learn as much.

This kind of idea, for example: http://valums.com/files/2009/menu/final.htm

The issue here would be sensitivity, in the case that a slight cursor move of one pixel might shift the tab bar very far, if lots of tabs are open - it would get harder and harder to specify a certain tab. But there would need to be about 100 tabs open for this to be the case...

I currently like the ability to 'tear' off a tab into a new window with a mouse drag.
If you implemented this nested / grouped pages tab idea, it would be great if tearing off a group tab resulted in the automatic expansion of the member pages into normal 'top-level' tabs.

A mouse over on a grouped tab should also result in a drop down menu of the titles of all the member pages.

And while you are messing about with how tabs behave, have you thought of implementing a slide down layer that would allow people to work across more than one page without a new window. 

There would be an implicit peg point half way down the browser window. If you select a tab and drag it while keeping the mouse key down, the page would slide down the screen to the half way point with a second tab bar at its top. The user could slide tabs up and down at will and navigate tabs within each bar as usual. There would also be a shift select option to allow the action on groups of tabs.

For simplicity there would be no bookmarks or buttons or address field on the bottom half. Any action in those areas would affect the currently active tab - visual cue needed:  throw a bold blue border around the currently active tab when the mouse moves over those bars. But there would be a single button that would slide all the bottom tabs back in one go - a return to full screen action. 

You could also visualise the 'peg - point' and allow the user to adjust it within a range (say .25 to .75) of the available window. 

This would be fantastic on small form factors (pads, laptops, netbooks) where working with two pages at once can require a high 'memory load' when you are using content in one page, say an article, to inform action on another, say a blog in which you are critiquing said article.

Going back to my suggestion of an auto-expansion of a group tab being implicit in a tear-off action, it may also be useful if a slide-down action on a group tab had the same effect.

There are saturation points for any behaviour that attempts to handle multiple open pages. I think there is a point where the browser designers just shouldn't bother with anything more elaborate that a 'more...' tab on the right that can show a drop down on mouse over. Past a certain point users just have more tabs open than anyone can pay attention to. It's analogous to window clutter on the desktop. Any UI helper behaviour will reach a point of diminishing marginal returns.

Finally - have you considered a 'squish-override' - give me a simple way to unsquish a tab. There is currently no double-click action on a tab. Why not just expand the title of any tab I double click and leave it expanded until I double click it again. 

http://codereview.chromium.org/3204007/show

Not a perfect solution but a useful one.

3 things i'd like to have: scrollbar, resize line for sidetabs and move new tab button from sidetabs bar to the main toolbar

	sidebar2.png 23.7 KB   View   Download

i haven't read through all of the comments here so i don't know if this was mentioned or not, but what about having tabs get bigger when your mouse gets close to them? sort of like the magnification thing on the dock of OS X?

 Issue 61215  has been merged into this issue.

I don't know about you guys but I actually prefer if the tabs were something like ObjectDock (or the mac icon doc) where the tabs will expand when you get close to it.

I hope Google UI team takes a look at the new "Tab Stack" feature on Opera 11. This would be a great solution to the problem on Chrome. It's like Tab candy only better.

+1 to the tab stack in opera, although its not perfect, it has ALOT of potential, i always thought tab candy was a little over the top, but tab stack is a perfect solution to tab overflow!

The problem with ObjectDock like feature is that you can't have the close functionality with it. Once you've moved your cursor away from the center to the x button to close the tab, a new tab would be focused. This is especially true when you have hundred of tabs open.

Just watched Opera's Tab stack and I'd say it's awesome. It shares some of my suggestion on comment 129 but Opera's is more polished and functional. We can one up it by offering the possibility to group not just tabs but also stacks of tabs indefinitely XP

Also, I think that private browsing and none private browsing tabs should not warrant separate windows - similar to Opera's.

I'd like the option to have rows of tabs, myself.  Either that or have the option to close all windows at once and have all of them restored with their tabs the next time I start Chrome.  Currently my browser is unusable with more than 35 tabs because either (a) The tabs get too small for even an icon to be displayed or (b) I have to open another window and the tabs from whatever window I close first won't be saved.

Optional rows of tabs (with definable minimum width for a single tab) would be really nice — sometimes you have to open a lot of tabs and select them in random order (e. g. when reading HTML documentation with separate files for sections).

 Issue 70542  has been merged into this issue.

a very basic and important feature. it bothers me every day.

issue 467 referring to the same problem
while  issue 24080  is this bug linux manifestation

 Issue 13592  has been merged into this issue.

Product Version      : 0.2.149.27
<b>URLs (if applicable) :</b>
<b>Other browsers tested:</b>
<b>Add OK or FAIL after other browsers where you have tested this issue:</b>
     Safari 3: OK
    Firefox 3: OK
         IE 7: OK

<b>What steps will reproduce the problem?</b>
1.Adding many tabs. 

<b>What is the expected result?</b>
Scrollable tabs.

<b>What happens instead?</b>
Add tab button disappears after a certain number of tabs and the tabs do 
not scroll.

What is the expected result?

what the user CHOSE. I'd choose a multi-row tab bar just because I have a big widescreen AND I like having two windows side by side at once. This renders scrolling/non-scrolling/vertical tabs pretty useless.

I like how Firefox does this. I don't understand those who are saying having a "forced" minimum width to tabs is jarring. How so? Firefox's scrolling tabs and minimum length works perfectly for me because I close tabs as I move along. The minimum width allows me to always be able to see the contents "name/title" in the tab--which is not the case when using Chrome. I always open Firefox when I'm going to be opening multiple tabs because:

1.) I do not get a prompt asking me to confirm that I want to open multiple tabs.

2.) Minimum tab width and scrolling tabs makes moving through the tabs easy and effortless. When Chrome starts shrinking tab width, I can't tell what the tab contents are. It makes it tough to use Chrome when dealing with multiple tabs that start shrinking.

I vote for minimum tab width with scrolling like Firefox. I'm interested in hearing exactly what is wrong with "forcing" a minimum tab width though. I find Chrome's implementation of increasingly shrinking tab widths to be jarring. I have had zero problems with the way Firefox does it.

I voted for this, but what I really want is multi-row fixed width tabs, which fixes the same issue.

But, this might be against Chrome design principles, so it might be a solution to make multi-row tabs an extension, and scrolling tab bar the default. But please somehow bring in multi-row fixed width tabs! 

Firefox's solution by far makes the most sense. Having the tabs get infinitely smaller is just not usable, the tab should have a minimum width that is easily readable and clickable. Firefox's solution reduces clutter and lets you have a massive amount of tabs open without things getting too overwhelming. 

I'd be interested to know why having a minimum width is "bad" as well.

Why can't you just give us multiple tab rows???? Clearly many people want it!

 Issue 89119  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 89172  has been merged into this issue.

I think Firefox Panorama  - the best solution. The same would like to see in Chrome

What about implementing Firefox's solution AND add multi-line tabs as an option? (Like Opera does).

I hate firefox's min-width restriction on a tab and prefer chrome's action to shrink the tab.

+1 for Firefox Panorama view and allow invoking it on holding [ctrl] + tapping [tab].

I think adding options in preferences for a user to choose which tab management scheme they want to use would be the best solution. That way everyone is happy, and chrome would still get to keep its default look and feel.

I would vote for the options being:
Default - the current tab scheme
Scrollable - like the way firefox is by default
Multi-Row - such as the way tab mix plus for firefox behaves and automatically adds up to a set limit number of rows (and then scrolls the rows when there are too many tabs for the rows open)
Multi-Row with autohide - such as has been suggested before where only one tab row is displayed until a user mouseovers the tab bar, then more rows are displayed
and i'm sure other users have more management schemes they could suggest

How does the "side tabs" flag work? I would check, but chrome://flags is currently not working for me.

If Chrome isn't going to include a tab list, why not optimize the tab bar to avoid long rows?

Here's a quick mockup I made showing how can you decrease the screen space of tabs by sorting them by domain (one of many possible defaults).

Even just being able to move open tabs into a scrollable list container would be a huge improvement. 

	chrome_overflow_mockup.png 84.2 KB   View   Download

I would like to mention that the experimental side tabs feature which was recently removed, is the only usable solution to this problem that I have seen suggested here. So much so, in fact, that I and many others actually used it. I have included a screenshot for reference.

Almost all of the options mentioned here actually conceal overflow tabs rather than exposing them, which defeats the entire purpose. There is a reason that drop-downs for interfaces and navigation are considered a usability nightmare. The rest of the suggestions serve to limit valuable vertical space, which has always been highly valued in Chrome.

If you haven't noticed, I am a bit biased toward side tabs. I used them and they were hands-down the best solution available for Chrome. Please give them serious consideration as a solution to this very real problem.

	vertical-chrome-tabs.png 137 KB   View   Download

Multirow is a killer feature of the Firefox's TabMixPlus, it would be great to see it implemented in the Chrome.

Optional multi-row tabbar would be extremely appreciated!

 Issue 105857  has been merged into this issue.

Why not implement something similar to opera's tab stacking? When the tab bar is saturated enough tabs from the same site could be stacked into a single tab. Users could also manually stack tabs.

Vertical tabs was definitely the way to go with multiple tabs. Unfortunately this feature was removed recently. Please vote to return it back.
http://www.change.org/petitions/google-chrome-support-vertical-tabs
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100319

I don't know a single chrome user how isn't frustrated by the lack of tab functionality.
I've added a longer reply in 
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=71e599f176315a29&hl=en&start=80 since I think it might be reasonable to look into something like contextual grouping (nobody would want to label their tabs, but it would be easy enough to mouse-drag them to group them) which could be superior to normal tab rows. and definitely, this should get more attention...

Good God Chrome developers...


Implement multi row tabs already, how hard can it be? Stop being so 2004. 

+1 for multi-raw, all people who works in web keep open pages, and have more then 20 pages open always.

Anything less than the ability to have multi-line tabs is unusable

Please add the ability to show tabs on multiple rows.  My most common browsing habits involve having a dozen or more tabs open at once, and Chrome simply makes that unmanageable.  I simply cannot switch to Chrome without this feature, as much as I'd like to give up Firefox for the otherwise-superior Chrome.

Happy to help out on implementation as soon as UI has a final spec.

Why not implement something like what is done in the Chrome Beta for Android? I found that it's a good way to manage tabs. You can have it so groups of overflowing tabs on both sides clump together and clicking the edge moves over . Right now, its impossible to view tabs on the right or make out the names of the tabs that are visible. Some functionality is better than none and I'm surprised that its been more than 3 years without this issue being addressed.

I can't believe this issue is more than three years old, in the intervening period they implemented the ideal solution to this issue (vertical tabs, enabled by explicit user action) and the *discarded the idea* with virtually no explanation, and completely refuse to even discuss the issue any more. Every feature request for "vertical tabs" is closed, despite getting hundreds of votes in just a few months. This thread has been around *3 years* and has less votes and comments than every vertical tabs thread. Is there some overlap among those users? probably I know I'm one who has posted in multiple threads, but mostly it's because I'm so thoroughly disgusted. Is it really taking 3 years to develop a a way for a user to specify a minimum tab width? 90% of the comments in this thread are asking for the user to have a choice. Here's a novel concept: why not make the tab bar a canvas that plugins can access? then all chrome has to worry about is painting the tab bar. Want vertical tabs? write a plugin to display the tab bar vertically. Want scrolling tabs with a minimum width? write a plugin! want your tab strip to grow to multiple rows? Plugin! Then the user can load whatever plugin style )or styles) suit him or her in the moment. This isn't rocket science, people.

Multi-Row tabs is not the answer. That creates clutter. You need to limit the window to a certain number of tabs based on the person's resolution, after which point, the next new tab you open, actually opens in a new window. Any new tabs you open from the window open in the newly created window. Then you need an option to quickly jump between windows. 

> Multi-Row tabs is not the answer. That creates clutter. You need to limit the window to a certain number of tabs based on the person's resolution

I'm sorry, but that's a ridiculous solution for a non-problem.  You can add a vertical scroll buttons for rows of tabs like it's done in TabMix+.  Number of rows that are displayed simultaneously should be configured, at least through an extension script.

Tab Mix Plus 4 Firefox works great need this feature in chrome to switch browsers

	Безымянный.png 57.4 KB   View   Download

 Issue 25507  has been merged into this issue.

You guys has just released chrome for iOS and on the iPad, you have overflow of tabs handled beautifully. Please just do a copy and paste and I'll be happy. This is one of the issues preventing me from moving over to chrome.

> Multi-Row tabs is not the answer. That creates clutter.

The problem I am seeing over and over in this thread is this: Who are you to tell me what is clutter on my screen?  Who are you to determine how I might be most productive?  It seems like the developers here are taking their own very limited view of what works best for them, and honestly expect that everyone else should see the error of their ways and follow the developers' lead in "best practices".  In the end, it sounds more like a religious cult rather than an intellectual discussion of a technical issue.

Please understand that for many aspects of a typical browser (not just the tab bar), there are multiple ways to handle the same situation.  What works best for one user may seen completely insane to another user.  Just because a solution looks great on your fancy cell-phone does not mean this is the right solution to apply to desktops.  Just considering tabs in firefox, there are plugins for multi-row, vertically scrolling rows, pop-up windows, and grouping tabs.  If there was a 'best' way to handle tabs for everyone, we would not be seeing such a diversity in available solutions!

I tried chrome today because of recommendations, and I have found that I simply cannot work without having clear multi-row tabs.  I'll be watching this issue, but from what I have seen, this is the one and only problem that prevents me from switching and really giving chrome a good workout.

> you have overflow of tabs handled beautifully

If you're on windows trying enabling 'Stacked Tabs' in about:flags.

Comment 191: first two paragraphs are absolutely spot on. The developers' presumptuousness on this matter has been astonishing. Sometimes I honestly wish Chrome was shareware so that devs would give a damn about their user base and lose the elitist attitude and/or naive non-conformism.

To be fair, not all chrome devs have this attitude (eg Comment 183) but enough of them do to hinder progress on this.

Comment 193: I am tl;dr on this thread, so I am not quite get what's wrong with open source vs shareware. You're free to work on a patch on if you keen to invest some money - hire somebody to provide the patch for you.

 Issue 137239  has been merged into this issue.

Honestly this is the absolute primary reason I do not use Chrome, and the reason everyone I know who does not use Chrome refuses to use it. It's ridiculous to imply, as some developers have, that adding a couple of different display modes for tabs (i.e. scrollable, vertical, multi-row) would suddenly make Chrome some horrendous piece of bloatware. I understand that the team wants to get the feature "just right" when they finally decide to release a solution. However, I hate to tell you this Google, but it's been nearly four years for God's sake and there is still no solution! 

In my opinion (and I think many others' too) having some way to use large amounts of tabs that is, in your opinion, "less than perfect" while you develop your end-all be-all solution is necessary. Chrome has developed a reputation for being a stable, well-designed piece of software, but I mean look at the behavior when you open many tabs! You call that elegant? You call that well designed? It's a blaring issue in your software!

The Stacked Tabs experimental feature is a great step in the right direction, but it still falls short of other implementations. If you could just add mousewheel scrolling for it so it works kind of like Cover Flow, then I think I could manage.

LOL This request is 4 years old and still nothing has been done about this feature. Wow, Google chrome developers, amazing progress. Just make an API for the tabs so that extension developers can make extensions for tab IU. The extension developers will solve this problem in a couple weeks, after Google couldn't improve tab IU for 4 years. roundofapplause

I have for years been a die hard Firefox power user, because it was a work horse. I had myself convinced that I could put up with it being slow, laggy, and as one user on here aptly put it, clunky, because I could customize it however I wanted. I'm giving chrome an honest try this week, and I love almost everything about it. Despite missing some of the customization, I consider it better in every way besides the (lack of) solution to tabitis. I keep ~10 tabs open constantly, and often get upwards of 50-100.

Now I'm not going to get upset with Chrome developers, or make sarcastic remarks, or even ragequit like half of the other users on here, because they've created a great product that I'm really starting to love- but these tiny tabs are killing me. Some people suggest more windows, but I can't imagine more clutter than flipping back and forth between windows trying to find the one tab I want, when there's often no correlation between each tab to base a grouping off of. I prefer not to use vertical tabs, because I like my horizontal screen real estate. I loved the rows of tabs that tabmix plus on ff offered, because all of my tabs were in one spot, and I could easily scroll through them to find what I needed-but that's only my preference.

One fix will not work for everybody. That can't be understated. Do not tell me, random user whocares@gmail.com, that I need to use more windows. I do not want to. Same as the user from comment 191, I want a choice.


That being said, I went to about:flags and enabled "Stacked Tabs." Many thanks to the developers, this will make Chrome usable for now (I can see the tab titles now, yay!), but if the they are listening (this thread is probably a long running joke with them), a better way to scroll (like using the scroll wheel?) would be nice, so that I don't have to aim for the tiny little 'stacked' tabs poking out.

I have for years been a die hard Firefox power user, because it was a work horse. I had myself convinced that I could put up with it being slow, laggy, and as one user on here aptly put it, clunky, because I could customize it however I wanted. I'm giving chrome an honest try this week, and I love almost everything about it. Despite missing some of the customization, I consider it better in every way besides the (lack of) solution to tabitis. I keep ~10 tabs open constantly, and often get upwards of 50-100.

Now I'm not going to get upset with Chrome developers, or make sarcastic remarks, or even ragequit like half of the other users on here, because they've created a great product that I'm really starting to love- but these tiny tabs are killing me. Some people suggest more windows, but I can't imagine more clutter than flipping back and forth between windows trying to find the one tab I want, when there's often no correlation between each tab to base a grouping off of. I prefer not to use vertical tabs, because I like my horizontal screen real estate. I loved the rows of tabs that tabmix plus on ff offered, because all of my tabs were in one spot, and I could easily scroll through them to find what I needed-but that's only my preference.

One fix will not work for everybody. That can't be understated. Do not tell me, random user whocares@gmail.com, that I need to use more windows. I do not want to. Same as the user from comment 191, I want a choice.

So my plea to the developers: Please let me have that. You don't even have to code it. Just enable tabs to be customized by extensions, there's people lined up out the door who would love to code it for us, because they, like me, and the many who have commented here, just want a choice. I guarantee you'll see a mass conversion of users like myself before you can say 'goodbye sawtooth tabs.'


That being said, I went to about:flags and enabled "Stacked Tabs." Many thanks to the developers, this will make Chrome usable for now (I can see the tab titles now, yay!). If the developers are indeed listening (this thread is probably a long running joke with them), a better way to scroll (like using the scroll wheel?) would be nice, so that I don't have to aim for the tiny little 'stacked' tabs poking out. Just sayin.

Why not just do it *exactly* the same way that Firefox currently does it? Minimum width tabs, nice sideways scrolling behaviour (great with newer mice), and a nice drop-down list of all tabs when needed.

We know Firefox's way works with many, many tabs, it looks fine, it quite usable. There's no need to create some fancy new scheme, but there is a pressing need to deal with the absolute mess that is > 20 tabs per window.

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

(No comment was entered for this change.)

 Issue 245201  has been merged into this issue.

Sorry, but I couldn't bother to read the entire thread, so sorry if this has been proposed before.

This is my proposal, and in my opinion the best approach to tab managing.

A "tab manager" button is added to either the tab bar or the tool bar. When you click on it, a floating dialog is displayed. This dialog contains a matrix of tabs, grouped in bars of tabs. Older bars are stacked in the bottom, whereas newer are in the top. You may scroll vertically to browse through the bars.

Whenever you point at a single tab, it'll be highlighted and a tooltip will immediately pop up containing the full tab title. Whenever you click at any tab, the bar containing such tab will replace the current one at the tab bar, and the tab that was clicked will become the currently displayed tab in the browser. Afterwards the "tab manager" dialog should automatically close.

It'd be useful too if such "tab manager" would allow the closing of single tabs, entire bars, as well as all tabs. And ideally tab ordering, by dragging and dropping.

This approach would be in most cases as fast as tab scrolling in FF, or even faster. You have to click once in an arrow to scroll in FF to find a tab out of scope. You'd have to click once as well in this "tab manager" to display a lot of tabs at once. Then you'd click on the tab of your choice in both cases. There might be the case in this approach where you wouldn't find your desired tab upon opening the tab manager dialog, which would force you to scroll through it to find it, adding one more step to the process than in FF, but I believe this is negligible as more tabs would be displayed at the same time in this approach compared to FF approach, and probably it will be a much faster and more comfortable approach to finding a given tab in most cases.

If the devs decline to accept this approach, then I guess this is something I'd like to see implemented in any browser, so I guess I'd propose this to Mozilla devs.

Regards,
oxi

P.S.: sorry about the awful design, but I suck at that, and I'm sure you get a rough idea

	chrome-tabs.jpg 78.2 KB   View   Download

I'd just like to point out that Chrome already has a minimum tab width.

Being able to scroll across to the tabs extending out to the right would be nice, but I'd actually be sorry to see the minimum tab width raised (except perhaps if it were to always display the favicon).

	Chrome already has a minimum tab width.png 136 KB   View   Download

Why don't you make an option somewhere for minimum tab width? Leave the behaviour as you have it now to default, but make an option to do it firefox style.

I would be happy if I could at least see the icon of every tab. Having no icons at all is just horrible.

Please at least add the option to do it the way FF does! How many Chrome users need to make this request before it gets implemented? Every time I try to come back to Chrome from FF, this sends me right back to FF.

I think Chrome could take a cue from SublimeText 3. The tabs in SublimeText are almost identical to Chrome's, with tab stacking enabled. The difference is you can scroll through tabs in ST3 just like Firefox. In addition, there is a tiny, unobtrusive down arrow on the right side next to the tabs. Clicking this presents a list of open files and allows very quick and easy switching. There is also a left/right scroll button on the left of the tabs. That one I could take or leave, but the dropdown button is very useful, as is scrolling.

	sublimetext.png 59.0 KB   View   Download

Why Google is ignoring this request? A lot of people would like to see that multiline feature, and they just ignore us !!!

It's just the same with closing all tabs without warning on clicking the close button.

Ultimately, they could easily implement those features, but choose not to because it's Chrome, not Firefox, and according to the devs, those FF features have "problems" (not that anyone would actually describe them) and they're working on reinventing the wheel themselves.

And by that I mean, in several years they've made no progress whatsoever on these issues, and likely never will.

Even if they have legitimate design gripes with notifications and tab scrolling, and they actually were taking all this time to design something without such problems, the best approach to this would be to temporarily implement FF's behavior until they can come up with something better to replace it. And, yet, instead, they do absolutely nothing to help people affected by them.

Just give us the fucking vertical tabs (side tabs) back! I'm sick and tired of this shit!

Restricting comments to those with Edit permissions for the time being.  I assume the design leads will unlock once they have something they want to share here.

Until then, I'm sorry that we don't have any kind of tab overflow solution for super-heavy tab users out there.  I wish I was posting on here with news that the design leads have a spec and we're going to implement it.  Unfortunately, until that happens, more posts on this bug are only going to make the relevant people tune it out.

 Issue 409471  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 152956  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 160990  has been merged into this issue.