But the tradeoff here isn't between a few dozen pixels vertically and a few dozen horizontally. It's 28 vertical pixels in exchange for cutting the horizontal space for the address bar and tab bar each in half, roughly.
Who really needs an address bar spanning the entire width of their screen? If you run into an URL that long then it's highly unlikely to contain useful information anyway. Or do you regularly notice yourself scanning through 400 characters of query string gibberish and thinking "that information was so useful that I always need all of it on screen"?
You don't. But why use that space to put the tab bar which DOES require the entire width? Chrome's and Firefox's compromise seems good enough where they stuff everything else to the right and left of the address bar except tabs. This Safari change is just awful
Chrome is horrible when you’ve got more then a few tabs since each tab just shrinks to a tiny unrecognizable notch, Safaris approach of scrolling in the tab bar is vastly superior in my opinion and makes the area much more useful even if it’s smaller. And this is without considering the new tab groups. I never really liked chromes tab-bar.
Tab groups are Apple’s solution to having less space for tabs. As a casual Tree Style Tabs user I can see them really working better than one giant mess of tabs.
Honest question. How are people using tabs such that they would want to organise them? Most of my tabs have lifetimes of seconds to minutes and there is no order in the chaos to be found.
I find how people use tabs a lot like how people use Excel. Excel is super flexible with thousands of features, but people only use a few of them. The rub is each person uses a different few. Tabs are similar. They are a flexible tool and people design personal workflows around them.
How I use tabs is probably nothing like how you use tabs or another random person uses them. I’m actually fascinated how people design their own workflows in this way. Anytime I see someone’s screen I end up with a ton of questions asking ‘why’.
I definitely wish that I could group tabs when I am working. I keep groups of tabs together, and these tab groups have long lifetimes. I also open various differently size windows depending on the content of each page. All of this is to work around the mess of "good enough" user interfaces that I deal with everyday. If I see myself opening more "ad hoc" tabs, I closed them as soon as I can. I don't need any more chaos.
Right now I am not at work, and I have three browser windows open and there are no scroll bars. I have managed to turn off tabs for the most part using Firefox userChrome.css and about:config. If I need another browser page, I'll open another browser window. When I have more than 4 or 5 browser windows I start stacking/offsetting the windows.
I’m on chrome, but I’m using them through a simple development extension I wrote which examines the url of ungrouped tabs and adds matching tabs to a few predetermined groups that I’ve hard-coded into the JavaScript. It was a quick and dirty hack that took me about 30 min to setup, but it’s made the tab grouping functionality so much more useful.
I’m toying with the idea of adding an options page so that I could release it to the chrome store, but I hate UI work, so I haven’t gotten around to that yet.
I keep 2 browser windows, each with 10+ tabs. One is those with short lifetimes, as you mention. The other is a "reminder list" of things I want to defer for a few hours.
As someone else with a small laptop display, I run everything in fullscreen mode, and toggle out whenever I need to use the controls. If you’re hiding the controls anyway, why not just use fullscreen mode? Then, when you want the controls, you don’t need to have them hidden in a bunch of layers, they can just all be there.
Hey, whatever if we just made all the browser controls a modal or fullscreen context of it’s own?
You can't always use full screen, often you need to have multiple windows open next to each other, and that's where minimizing chrome is especially important, because your windows are smaller now but the size of the chrome remains the same.
Is there a browser where the address bar spans the entire width of their screen? I've got FF Dev on Mac right now - about 60% of the screen eyeballing it. Have managed not to install Chrome on this machine and have to give it back in a couple weeks so I don't intend to install it if I can help it but from what I can recall it's not 100% either. Where is this entire width of the screen thing coming from?