I'd consider switching to Chrome if it weren't for the nightmarish way it expects you to manage tabs. I typically have 30 or so tabs open at any given time, and in Chrome that means a horizontal row of very tiny tabs with only icons (no text...therefore no context) across the top. They used to have sidebar capabilities (on Windows, which didn't help this Linux user) but for some reason I can't fathom they removed them.
Contrast this with Firefox, where I can easily get a tab bar down the side via a plugin (I use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...). Even without a plugin, FF gives me the Expose-like functionality (ctrl+shift+e) which will show me all open tabs and their titles.
How Google can think the current tab situation in Chrome is useful is a mystery to me.
The one thing Chrome tabs have going for them is that they're oh so fast and smooth. I think tabs in Chrome are like the Dock for Mac OS X.
When OS X was first released, the Dock was an object of ridicule. (Among some of us, it still is, but we all realize that by now it's not going away.) It was demonstrably worse than previous mechanisms at just about everything, and it make OS X look like a toy. Eventually Tog[1] came around, sort of:
> Contrary to my previously-held position, I no longer believe Apple should get rid of the Dock. It's just too pretty [...] You want a visibly-apparent manifestation of the personality of the underlying technology. That's why automakers spend milliions making the outside of the car project an image of what's underneath the skin.
The supersmooth tabs in Chrome are probably a significant portion of what makes Chrome feel faster, even when it isn't. Like the Dock, their outrageously high demo value probably exceeds their limited scalability for more experienced users.
I still use Chrome despite it not behaving very well with 10 or so tabs open. It either starts getting slow or will keep the previous page's cache and will refuse to load the new (URL) page. The ways around this are annoying. Close unresponsive tab and open new one, restart the browser or empty cache. FF seems not to suffer from this problem but it still feels a bit slower in general.
What's worse is when you have enough tabs open, they start becoming hidden under the open-new-tab button on the right. This has been a bug for a long time. I suspect it's gotten tied up with the furor over the removal of the side/vertical tabs, which have been hacked in via addons since. What's sad is that Firefox already has an elegant solution -- maintain a minimum useful tab width and enable horizontal scrolling of the tab row when the mouse is over it.
Ill bet he just opens every link in a new tab and uses tabs as readme-later list and navigation history. Both usecases are better served differently.
In general there is lots of overlap between tabs/tabgroups/bookmarks/history/readmelater/systemtaskbar/sessionrecovery.
Most people need all use cases but pick one or two features and emulate the rest themselves. Most tab related firefox plugins essentially duplicate functionality already present on top of the tab system.
For example: hierarchical tabs on the left with tab recovery is identical to having a bookmark list on the left.
It is my opinion that these concepts should all merge, preferbly at the desktop shell level. Ubuntu is movng is this direction, but they add this functionality on top of all the existing functionality. We can only hope that they will in the future consolidate all the overlap.
They're really not. Not with any alternatives I've found, anyway. Tabs aren't just navigation history; they're curated, temporary history. Unworthy of the permanence of bookmarking, yet too important to regulate to the dense, rapid flow of history.
I use Pocket and Delicious to keep things in check, but they don't help as much I'd like. The most effective tab management tool for me has been Firefox's tab candy/expose feature. It's much easier to get an overview of what's open and spot unnecessary tabs with the grid of thumbnails.
I don't think tabs with tab recovery is always equivalent to a bookmark list. Personally, I have 30-40 tabs open. This is because I have several projects I work on, any of which I may research in 10 or more tabs. When I switch between projects, I don't want to have to close all the tabs and reopen them. I don't care if they are swapped out of memory, but the access should remain easy. Having to manually bookmark these to come back to them isn't easy.
I was not claiming the problem exist with the user.
Im claiming there is lots of overlap in functionality. The differences are in the default behavior and the UI elements. In the end, it should all be one big directed graph.
I would rather state it the other way around. The fact that people use tabs, means the bookmark functionality is broken from a UX perspective.
If I'm doing some kind of research, I'm quite likely to have over 100 tabs open. In Firefox, I use Tab Mix Plus to get 3 rows of 10 tabs with the option to scroll the rows. 30 tabs is a good working set really.
Whenever I'm stuck with another browser, I'm still in the habit of launching lots of tabs but then I immediately get lost.
Contrast this with Firefox, where I can easily get a tab bar down the side via a plugin (I use this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...). Even without a plugin, FF gives me the Expose-like functionality (ctrl+shift+e) which will show me all open tabs and their titles.
How Google can think the current tab situation in Chrome is useful is a mystery to me.