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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I love the way chrome handles tabs, especially the way they shrink. The icon is enough to distinguish it and even if there is no icon for that page you already know its appromixmate position and can quickly find it (which you just can't when everything scrolls and you have no idea where you are).

The firefox tab scroll feature is probably the feature I hate the most, in any browser (yes, you can disable it - but bad defaults stink and you can't just go around and change the settings in everyones browser).

First time I've come across someone that doesn't hate it :o

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The icon frequently isn't enough to distinguish tabs especially if you have a bunch of reddit/hacker news/wikipedia/google/tvtropes tabs open. Once it has shrunk to nothing there is little chance of knowing what any tab is except when going back and forth between a couple of tabs. Firefox also has a drop down list and lets you switch to a tab by entering a partial title/address in the address bar.

I remember Firefox used to have the bad behaviour like chrome(back in the 1.5 days) and I would occasionally use an IE shell called crazy browser to do my extremely many tab surfing(I also used 2 browsers partially so I could surf something else while 70+ political blogs or webcomics were loading since browsers tended to freeze for a long time on that back in those days).

I much prefer the Firefox tab scroll feature, compared to Chrome's way of handling tabs. The handy "show all tabs" dropdown is nice as well. Between the two, I find managing large numbers of tabs to be easier and less painful in FF than in Chrome.

YMMV.

I hated it too and then I installed the "Tree style tabs" add-on. It's great, they should add that functionality in the vanilla Firefox IMO.

Once the tabs get small chrome hides all the icons. It's awful. Whereas firefox can be configured to shrink tabs indefinitely and it never stops showing the icons.

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