14 DAY TRIAL // While I personally hate to have more than a handful of tabs running in the same browser instance, there are users out there who keep tens or even hundreds of tabs active at the same time.
On Google Chrome, however, doing this is quite a painful experience, as the way the browser works is by reducing the size of each tab to group all active pages in the same tab bar.
Basically, this means that the more tabs you open, the smaller their size is going to be, so once you have a hundred pages loaded, for instance, you barely see anything in the tab bar.
Google Chrome is working to fix this and a future update would borrow an idea that was pioneered by Mozilla on its very own Firefox browser.
As discovered by TechDows, what Google wants to do is allow users to scroll tabs on the tab bar, so their size would no longer be reduced to the point where you don’t see anything.
Coming to Chrome in a future update
A Google engineer explained on reddit that this feature is already in the works, but no ETA has been provided on when it could go live for everyone.
“Scrollable tabstrip is in the works. In the meantime, try using shift-clicking and ctrl-clicking to select multiple tabs at once, then drag out to separate windows to group tabs by window,” he posted.
Most likely, the behavior of this new feature will be similar to the one in Mozilla Firefox. Basically, when there are more active tabs than the tab bar can handle, users can scroll them with arrows placed right on the bar or just using the mouse wheel.
The new Google Chrome feature isn’t yet available in the nightly builds of the browser, but it could be added soon for public testing given it’s already being worked on internally.