14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome is undoubtedly the world’s number one desktop browser, with third-party statistics showing that it’s installed on no less than 70 percent of the computers out there.
This is an impressive achievement, but Chrome running on 7 in 10 PCs out there doesn’t mean that the browser is just perfect and doesn’t need more improvements.
Living proof is that Google Chrome is still lacking a very essential feature that the Mountain View-based search actually started working on no less than 18 months.
It’s an option to be able to scroll through tabs with the mouse wheel, something that comes in incredibly handy when working with a plethora of tabs at the same time as I do.
Needless to say, the bigger the number of tabs, the harder it gets to find that one page that you need, and scrolling through all the tabs that are loaded in Google Chrome is a huge pain in the neck.
Google first added a scrollable tab strip flag in the browser one year and a half ago, as pointed by reddit user Leopeva64-2, only that it wasn’t activated because the feature just wasn’t ready.
“Yes, this important and anticipated feature is finally available in Chrome (for Windows). The flag to enable this feature appeared 18 months ago but the feature itself never worked on Windows (until today),” the reddit user explains.
And this is all changing now, as the Canary version of the browser finally enables the scroll support in the tab bar, essentially letting you scroll through tabs with the mouse wheel. However, this behavior still needs additional polishing.
“Currently, when you open several tabs, they shrink until you can only see the icon (and even the icon disappears at some point), this no longer happen in Chrome Canary, in this version, after opening certain number of tabs, you can scroll through them with the mouse wheel,” Leopeva64-2 notes.
At the same time, it looks like Google is also working on adding similar functionality powered by the keyboard, so essentially, you’ll be able to use the arrows to scroll through tabs in the tab bar.
Of course, there’s no ETA as to when this feature is projected to go live in the stable version of Chromium, but given that it’s already part of the latest Canary version, it shouldn’t take too long before this happens. Of course, once Google adds this functionality, it should land in other Chromium-powered browsers, including Microsoft Edge – Microsoft’s application is now using the same engine as Google Chrome, and the Redmond-based software giant has become one of the biggest contributors to the development of Chromium.
Needless to say, the new feature would be available not only on Windows, but also on macOS and on Linux, and the same will be the case for the other Chromium-powered browser that will borrow the same functionality once it becomes available.
While it’s great to see Google finally adding this feature to its desktop browser, the idea isn’t necessarily new, and several other Chrome alternatives out there are already coming with it. The most important of them is Firefox, Mozilla’s application which right now is the third most-used desktop browser and which has long been considered the best replacement to Google Chrome.
For the time being, Google has remained completely tight-lipped on this new capability, but we should hear more about it as the development process advances. The next Google Chrome version to land in the stable channel is build 87, which should land in beta between October 15-22 and then go live for production devices on November 17.