Wider tabs, when many tabs are open

Copper Contributor

Hi Edge community,

 

I use again Edge dev version since recently, after a break. Happy to see a big responsiveness and a fast webpage loading. 

 

Sometimes I open a "little big" number of tabs and contrary to Firefox, as I saw in Chrome, tabs are less and less larger and impossible to see a part of the tab's title. The view become bad when the number of tabs increase. 

 

Like said my title, if it's possible to developped in the future this optimization, it would be nice to see  wide tabs after a certain number of tabs (15 for example in the case of firefox) with a system of scroll to the right and the left, with mouse sweel to navigate in the tab bar. If some people don't like this navigation way, maybe add an option in settings to switch between "chrome classical tab bar" and this type of navigation.

 

I post two  screenshots about this issue to compare edge and firefox case

 

Here I know, I've exagerate but it's the case when you have many, many tabs in edge. 

 

Une technologie de pointe et 33 autres pages - Microsoft Edge 17_09_2019 13_10_35_LI.jpg

 

The case of Firefox when you have 15 tabs (the first tab is a little cut at the right to see the scrolling navigation) 

 

Mon Windows _ la communauté Windows 10, Surface, Mobile, Xbox et Microsoft francophone - Mozilla Firefox 17_09_2019 13_09_47.png

 

7 Replies

@auligeur 

Hi, welcome to the forum!

 

I've read your post and I understand that you're having trouble identifying which tab is which when there are too many open tabs in the same browser window.

to solve this problem, I wanna suggest something that is more achievable for the developers reading this post.

in the classic Edge (the one that is in Windows 10 by default), there is this feature called tab preview:

 

Annotation 2019-09-17 182503.png 

 

as you can see it works by hovering your mouse cursor over the tab. so if you have 200 tabs open, you can hover your mouse over them and see a preview so you can know what the tab is about.

 

another feature that is already in Google Chrome:

 

Annotation 2019-09-17 182433.png

 

I think this one is even better because you can change the settings to show you both the tab title and the tab preview image. in Google chrome it's called tab Tab Hover Card Images and it can be activated by a flag which means soon to be integrated into the browser by default.

so Microsoft can use either of these 2 features that already exist and make it happen.

 

 

Also, try this in your Edge insider browser, go to the Edge:flags and enable this flag:

 

Annotation 2019-09-17 183719.png

 

it will only show you the tab title when you hover your mouse over it, not the image preview.

 

Annotation 2019-09-17 183823.png

 

 

so let me know what you think about them and if they can/will solve your problem.

 

 

@HotCakeX Hi and thanks for the welcome :smile:

 

Very happy to see that this feature is always available in this new version of Edge. Yeah this help me very much to find my tabs (personally I've less tabs that the screencapture of edge), thanks :happyface:

 

But I always think that Chronium, the base of the project of the new edge, went in the wrong way for the tab bar management. It's not a wish for short-term but more for a long-term. For sure I know that is a huge task but the original version of edge had this scrolling navigation. 

 

I found an old post from 2011 about this. But google have always not change the navigation of the tab bar.

https://support.google.com/chrome/forum/AAAAJk-fN9wm3VFHLk9R3U/?hl=uk

 

Microsoft Edge 17_09_2019 18_28_49.png

 

 

A little thing  which can optimise quickly the navigation : we see after the + on the tab bar, there is a little arrow which was the tab menu and it the "big preview of tabs". Why not to use this type of arrow on the tab bar to add a menu where all tabs where listed. That would be very helpful for users which have many tabs. I looked for in flags and nothing about a menu like that to activate :sad:

 

But for sure, for the long term a reshaped tab bar, would be a a capital gain compared to chrome.

 

You're welcome ^^
You know I think it was a good move that Microsoft decided to use the open source chromium for their new browser but they should keep the UI of the classic Edge, it's been worked on for a long time. this Big tab preview i like that too, also the set tabs aside, the web inking, pdf inking and all other unique features included in the classic Edge.

@auligeur Apparently it is being developed for Chrome now, although the flag doesn't currently do anything: https://mspoweruser.com/google-chrome-is-almost-ready-to-counter-tab-overload/

@borednsecure Hey yeah, I thought I had read somewhere in the past that Chrome was going to add a scrollable tab bar. Still hasn't happened. I imagine that would a Chromium feature and therefore come to Edge too.

I hope Microsoft make their own version of it, the one they made years ago in classic Edge way before Google even realized the need for such feature.
Classic Edge UI + Google Chrome engines = the perfect browser
This, is a very good news =)