> In placing the close button on the right, Google have assumed that in the majority of cases, users are going to be wanting to close the most recently opened tabs first (likely to be the ones to the far right of the tab group) and have accordingly placed the close button on the right.
Really? Doesn't it make more sense that Chrome is primarily a Windows/Linux program where the close-window buttons are at the top-right, and Safari is primarily Mac where the buttons are at the top-left.
Why would they save work on the in-tab UI and make the close-tab X button on the right? The window control buttons are on the left like any other Mac app, and the same goes for the closing X button on the Developer Tools frame. Both of those are on the right in Windows. As you saw with the Arabic screenshot, they've already done the work to allow the closing X buttons to be on the left; if they wanted the Mac tab closing buttons to be on the left, they'd be on the left. It's not just a holdout from Windows.
While this seems plausible to me -- I'm on Linux, and other tabbed apps like gnome-terminal place the close-window button on the right -- I think that Chrome's behavior makes the most sense anyway. When you close a tab, tabs shift towards the left. Meaning that the left-most tab in your browser is always the oldest tab, and generally speaking tabs on the left are older than tabs on the right (precluding the possibility that you manually rearranged the tabs). So since tabs on the left tend to be the oldest, they're also the least likely to be closed soon, and tabs on the right tend to be younger, so they're more likely to be closed soon. Hence the close-on-the-right behavior.
My bad. I tried looking ahead of time to see if this had been posted before on HN and didn't find anything. I think it's because of the post's title, which differed from the article's. I was also under the impression that HN didn't allow repeat submissions, but I guess that feature expires after a certain amount of time. Does anyone know a close to fool-proof way for searching to see if an article has already been posted before?
410 days ago? I had just noticed this behavior in Chrome myself a few weeks ago, and thought it might be new beta behavior that no one had really talked about. Guess not.
Chrome's tab behaviour is superb. I also /love/ the Shift-Apple-T shortcut, which re-opens the last tab you closed with its Back button history intact. I use that several times a day.
Chrome’s UI is great but it’s also always the little details that kill it for me. After enjoying Chrome’s instant search (search results and pages load while you are typing) tremendously on a Windows laptop I once again decided to make Chrome my default browser instead of Safari on OS X, at least for a time. That was a week ago and I’m already back to Safari.
The problem was Chrome’s behavior when tearing off tabs. On OS X I usually don’t surf fullscreen, most of the time I have two windows with several tabs and varying widths open, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Creating two windows and placing them about right is easy with Safari, I click a tab and drag all the way to the screen edge where I want the window to be. (I basically click and flick my finger to the left or to the right on the trackpad, it’s impossible to miss.) The window will be placed with all its content on the screen. Quickly creating overlapping windows by tearing off tabs is also easy. You just have to drag down. Again, nothing will leave the screen.
Chrome doesn’t allow you to be so careless. The tab will end up exactly where your mouse is pointing even if that means that most of the window is not visible on the screen. You cannot quickly flick with your finger to create a second window and place it in roughly the right spot.
It was a very frustrating experience for me. Chrome really is nearly perfect in all other respects but such a glaring shortcoming is not really tolerable for something I use as frequently as a browser. I prefer how Chrome handles closing tabs but I much more often tear of tabs than closing several of them. (I also tend to use the keyboard shortcut for closing tabs but that is not an excuse for Safari to get closing tabs wrong. The right answer when someone brings up problems or clever tricks when using some application with the mouse is definitely not to say “But there are keyboard shortcuts!” I don’t think you should ever use keyboard shortcuts as excuses for botching an app’s behavior when using the mouse.)
Two other Mac projects that bring the excellent Google Chrome tab UI into other contexts: TotalFinder, a Finder mod that adds tabs to Finder windows (http://totalfinder.binaryage.com/), and Kod--still in beta--which will be a text editor somewhere in the ballpark of the mythical TextMate 2 (http://kodapp.com).
While the tab behaviour is good, the close buttons are hopelessly small. They are a tiny 12px by 12px on Windows. Compare this to the close window buttons, which are 64px by 24px.
Compounding the error is the poor choice of middle-click as the alternative close mechanism. Many older mouses and most laptops don't have middle click. When browsing on my laptop I can't use the touchscreen to close a tab, as the hit area is much to small to accurately hit. Likewise, using the trackpad to land the pointer on the button is something I find difficult to do reliably.
I don't understand why the hit area can't be increased. There is little penalty for incorrectly closing a tab, as Chrome has a handy "Recently closed tabs" menu.
Edit: A search turned up the newer "Chrome Toolbox" plugin, which brings the missing double-click-to-close behaviour to Chrome tabs.
I disagree about middle-click being a "poor" method. Middle-clicking is essential to mouse-based browsing these days, both for opening links in a new tab and for closing tabs. With middle-click, the whole issue of close button placement becomes moot.
Any laptop that doesn't have a separate middle-click button (hint: made by a fruit company laptops) likely provides some multi-touch method for middle-clicking. I also haven't come across a mouse in quite some time that does not have a middle-click (I use a including an 8 year old microsoft mouse).
Consider teaching yourself to use Ctrl/Cmd-W. Once you've done that and some of the other shortcuts (like Ctrl/Cmd-T to open a new tab, and Ctrl/Cmd+Shift-T to reopen a closed one), you'll rarely need a mouse for most websites.
First thing I do in Firefox is set it so I have one close X at the far right end of the bar. I realize this does require it to be fairly visible which tab is current but I still like that this button is always where I want it to be. My mouse always heads to the same location to close any tab, I can close multiples by clicking multiple times in the same place, and I don't waste space on every tab with X buttons when I could be seeing more of the tab title.
Just my personal preference but feels far more efficient to me.
Its basically the cocoa implementation of chrome's tabs ripped out and put into its own objective c lib. used by kod and other things mentioned in here. It includes all the seamless dragging and dropping of tabs between windows, everything the browser does.
The four other major browsers (Firefox, IE, Safari, Opera) have had years to copy this very useful behavior, and I can't understand why none of them have.
When I used to work at Microsoft, I explicitly requested this behavior on the internal IE8 forums (in beta at the time).
I took several tries to explain why this was important and at the end I got a very typical "Thanks for the feedback" and then the thread went cold. I don't think that PM ever understood what I was talking about, but several other commenters did.
This close tab behavior would indeed be fantastic if the most important tab behavior use case was "user should be able to close multiple tabs in rapid succession using the mouse." But really, how often would a typical user need to do that?
There may be a good reason to eschew prevailing Mac UI conventions and to put the tab close button on the right, but this isn't one.
Other interesting features that amazed me are, i) 'Close tabs to the right' option in right click menu. ii) New tab open behaviour. (New tab goes next to the current tab and not to the end. Extremely useful when you have lots of tabs opened.)
Woah, I just noticed that when the mouse hovers over "Close tabs to the right" or "Close other tabs", the tabs that will close start to flash. (Chrome 9.0.597.67 beta, Windows) When did that happen?
Along with being Fireballed today, it seems wherever that site is hosted on is currently not returning DNS records for the domain. Shame, as I have yet to see the content and would like to.
Well, it goes both ways. Often, I have a whole lot of tabs open that I want to get rid off so I just rapidly middle-click on the left-most one and keep doing it until they're all gone.
Of course, you can always right-click and say 'Close all tabs to the right' but I usually forget about that option at the time when I'm doing it.
[+] [-] jessriedel|15 years ago|reply
Really? Doesn't it make more sense that Chrome is primarily a Windows/Linux program where the close-window buttons are at the top-right, and Safari is primarily Mac where the buttons are at the top-left.
[+] [-] danteembermage|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudd|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eklitzke|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] axod|15 years ago|reply
You're much more likely to close recently opened tabs though.
[+] [-] jazzychad|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solipsist|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rudd|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simonw|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ugh|15 years ago|reply
The problem was Chrome’s behavior when tearing off tabs. On OS X I usually don’t surf fullscreen, most of the time I have two windows with several tabs and varying widths open, sometimes overlapping and sometimes not. Creating two windows and placing them about right is easy with Safari, I click a tab and drag all the way to the screen edge where I want the window to be. (I basically click and flick my finger to the left or to the right on the trackpad, it’s impossible to miss.) The window will be placed with all its content on the screen. Quickly creating overlapping windows by tearing off tabs is also easy. You just have to drag down. Again, nothing will leave the screen.
Chrome doesn’t allow you to be so careless. The tab will end up exactly where your mouse is pointing even if that means that most of the window is not visible on the screen. You cannot quickly flick with your finger to create a second window and place it in roughly the right spot.
It was a very frustrating experience for me. Chrome really is nearly perfect in all other respects but such a glaring shortcoming is not really tolerable for something I use as frequently as a browser. I prefer how Chrome handles closing tabs but I much more often tear of tabs than closing several of them. (I also tend to use the keyboard shortcut for closing tabs but that is not an excuse for Safari to get closing tabs wrong. The right answer when someone brings up problems or clever tricks when using some application with the mouse is definitely not to say “But there are keyboard shortcuts!” I don’t think you should ever use keyboard shortcuts as excuses for botching an app’s behavior when using the mouse.)
[+] [-] shadowpwner|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] statictype|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pak|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toolate|15 years ago|reply
Compounding the error is the poor choice of middle-click as the alternative close mechanism. Many older mouses and most laptops don't have middle click. When browsing on my laptop I can't use the touchscreen to close a tab, as the hit area is much to small to accurately hit. Likewise, using the trackpad to land the pointer on the button is something I find difficult to do reliably.
I don't understand why the hit area can't be increased. There is little penalty for incorrectly closing a tab, as Chrome has a handy "Recently closed tabs" menu.
Edit: A search turned up the newer "Chrome Toolbox" plugin, which brings the missing double-click-to-close behaviour to Chrome tabs.
[+] [-] oakenshield|15 years ago|reply
Any laptop that doesn't have a separate middle-click button (hint: made by a fruit company laptops) likely provides some multi-touch method for middle-clicking. I also haven't come across a mouse in quite some time that does not have a middle-click (I use a including an 8 year old microsoft mouse).
[+] [-] primigenus|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 51Cards|15 years ago|reply
First thing I do in Firefox is set it so I have one close X at the far right end of the bar. I realize this does require it to be fairly visible which tab is current but I still like that this button is always where I want it to be. My mouse always heads to the same location to close any tab, I can close multiples by clicking multiple times in the same place, and I don't waste space on every tab with X buttons when I could be seeing more of the tab title.
Just my personal preference but feels far more efficient to me.
[+] [-] StuffMaster|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wahnfrieden|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JonnieCache|15 years ago|reply
https://github.com/rsms/chromium-tabs
Its basically the cocoa implementation of chrome's tabs ripped out and put into its own objective c lib. used by kod and other things mentioned in here. It includes all the seamless dragging and dropping of tabs between windows, everything the browser does.
[+] [-] modeless|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snprbob86|15 years ago|reply
I took several tries to explain why this was important and at the end I got a very typical "Thanks for the feedback" and then the thread went cold. I don't think that PM ever understood what I was talking about, but several other commenters did.
[+] [-] ootachi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cobralibre|15 years ago|reply
There may be a good reason to eschew prevailing Mac UI conventions and to put the tab close button on the right, but this isn't one.
[+] [-] chrisbroadfoot|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronnier|15 years ago|reply
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/dbepggeogbaibhgn...
[+] [-] itsnotvalid|15 years ago|reply
I guess what chrome need to fix is the side of the button locating at (right vs left) if Apple did mention that in their "Guidelines".
[+] [-] ilamparithi|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Prolorn|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] X-Istence|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] leppie|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] statictype|15 years ago|reply
Of course, you can always right-click and say 'Close all tabs to the right' but I usually forget about that option at the time when I'm doing it.
[+] [-] dalore|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nowarninglabel|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] treblig|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drivebyacct2|15 years ago|reply