[cheese1756]

I completely agree. People should make sure to look at the claims, particularly under 1 at C:

"rendering, on the computing device, the tab management area such that a close button of a remaining tab is located at the screen position, wherein the rendering (b) comprises, when the tab management area was determined to be full in (b), translating the remaining tab to the left such that the remaining tab maintains the same width"

This is a patent on Chrome's mechanism for resizing the tabs after you move your mouse away from the tab bar, which is nicer than the standard method of resizing them while other tabs are still being closed. It's not a patent on opening and closing tabs in general.

Disclaimer: IANAL, but I have worked directly on patents.

[glomph]

Ugh. Does this mean firefox will not get this feature now?

[viraptor]

Depends on the patent licensing. They can always ask the authors to add it to OPN (https://www.google.com/patents/opnpledge/)

Currently the licensing terms are not published (https://covalentdata.com/patent/US08762879B1)