After the release of Chrome 69 with a new interface, many of the application's users realized that Google was trying to copy the old Firefox interface.
Google developers seem to want to add two more Firefox features to Chrome: tab groups and the scrollable tabs bar.
Both features are currently in development and we don't know when we'll see them come to the stable version of Chrome, at least for now.
The news emerged earlier this week, when a reporter from the Chrome Story blog noticed a problem in the Chrome issue tracker called “tab groups.”
The Google developer who posted the issue didn't describe exactly how the upcoming feature would work, but said that "users can organize tabs into visually distinct groups, for tabs related to different tasks."
The description of the feature is quite vague, but it's worth noting that the Mozilla Foundation had a similar feature in Firefox back in 2010. This particular feature allowed users to organize tabs into groups, displaying only one tab from each group.
The feature was great for users who liked to work with dozens or hundreds of tabs, but Firefox developers removed it in late 2015 because too few users were using it.
Google, on the other hand, could add the tab grouping mechanism that the Vivaldi browser uses. We'll just have to wait and see.
Adding support for tab groups makes sense, as it will help improve the tab congestion that Chrome is experiencing.
Tab stacking occurs when you open too many tabs, which indirectly reduces the width of each tab. This makes it impossible to read the tab title or view the website favicon. Finding a page among dozens of tiny tabs is incredibly annoying.
However, Chrome is not the only browser to suffer from this design issue. Vivaldi, Opera, and Brave browsers have exactly the same behavior, while Firefox and Microsoft Edge do not. Both browsers use a feature called scrollable tabs bar, which keeps the tab width at a certain minimum size, but allows the user to search left and right using the scroll arrows.
According to Techdows, Google will add a similar feature to an upcoming version of Chrome. “The scrollable tabs bar is in development,” told a Reddit user.
Searching the Chrome/Chromium issue tracker, we find that scrollable tabs have been one of the most requested Chrome features in recent years, with posts dating back to September 2008, with the release of Chrome 1.0.
_________________
