After the release of Chrome 69 with a new interface, many users of the app realized that Google was trying to duplicate the old Firefox environment.
Google developers seem to want to add two other Firefox features to Chrome: tab groups and the scrollable tabs bar.
Both are currently in development and we do not know when we will see them coming to the stable version of Chrome, at least for the time being.
The news came out earlier this week when a journalist from the Chrome Story blog noticed a problem with Chrome issue tracker with the name “tab groups”.
The Google developer who posted the issue did not specify how the upcoming feature would work, but said "users can organize tabs into visually distinct groups for tabs related to different tasks."
The description of the feature is quite vague, but it is worth noting that the Mozilla Foundation had a similar feature in Firefox 2010. This feature allowed users to organize tabs within groups, displaying only one tab of each group.
The feature was great for users who liked working with dozens or hundreds of tabs, but Firefox developers removed it at the end of 2015 because it was used by very few users.
Google on the other hand could add the tab grouping mechanism that uses the program browsing Vivaldi. We just have to wait and see.
Adding support for tabs groups makes sense, since it will help improve Chrome's accumulation tab.
The accumulation of tabs occurs when you open too many tabs, which indirectly leads to a decrease in the width of each tab. This makes it impossible to read the title of the tab or to view the favicon of the site. Finding one page among the dozens of tiny tabs is terribly annoying.
However, Chrome is not alone browser which addresses the specific design problem. The Vivaldi, Opera, and Brave browsers have exactly the same behavior, while Microsoft's Firefox and Edge do not. Both browsers use a feature called scrollable tabs bar, which keeps the tab width to 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", said Peter Casting, a Google Chrome developer, to a Reddit user.
Looking for the Chrome / Chromium issue tracker, we can see that scrolling tabs have been one of Chrome's most needed features in recent years, and that there are posts from September 2008, with the release of Chrome 1.0.
_________________
