Interestingly, I'd never use pinning if it didn't shrink the tab down. I never have any trouble with keeping my tabs ordered, so the main value pinning gives me is the shrinking.
FYI: You can still close the tab, just not by clicking the (no longer visible) X. This may not fit your use case, but then again it might (I can't remember the last time I closed a tab by clicking instead of with ctrl+w).
he is saying that he wishing pinning tabs _prevented_ the tab from being closed (as opera does). I have closed pinned tabs my mistake before (ctrl+w too many times) and I agree.
+1. I just now found out about it. Tried it, saw the tab reduced to a favicon, and will probably never use it till that's fixed. Especially with how a Gmail Tab blinks when I get a hangout message.
The "reduce to favicon" is my favorite part of pinned tabs: I pin all my slack tabs and other messaging tabs and just watch for the blue dot indicating activity and/or the red circle that indicates a private message (on slack)
Also there are some sites that don't work well with pinning, including G Suite. I'd love to have pinned tabs for work email, work calendar, personal email, and personal calendar. But every time my session expires, they all get redirected to login pages.