Tag Archives: sidebar tabs
7 Killer Google Chrome Tab Tricks
Posted on 04. Mar, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey. 
4 Comments
Tabs are basically the taskbar in Chrome, if you want to think about it like and operating system. Being able to use them to their maximum benefit is important to being productive. Because of this, here are some great tips for you to better manage, modify and extend your tab experience. Hope these help you with your everyday tasks!
Keyboard Shortcuts You can use keyboard commands to switch tabs, much like ALT+TAB in Windows. To go from left to right, you can use CTRL+TAB or CTRL+PGDN. For right to left, use CTRL+SHIFT+TAB or CTRL+PGUP. Know how to switch in Mac? Leave a comment.
Reopen Closed Tabs It really sucks when you have to go scouring your history to find a closed tab. Using the TabJump extension, you can go back to your previous ten tabs that you closed. TabJump also organizes tabs that are related and frequently used into a nice window that you can reference from the Omnibox.
Sidebar Window Could Come to Chrome Extensions, Webapps
Posted on 24. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 8 Comments
In a Chromium Blog post yesterday, a new contextual menu API was introduced, as well as two experimental ones: and Infobar and Omnibox API to offer developer more options when creating both extensions and webapps. Another possible API coming down the pipe would be sidebar functionality.
We’ve already seen the ability to move tabs to the side vertically as sidebar tabs; in June we got a glimpse of sidebars in some intriguing Chrome OS screenshots that were leaked.
As Google’s Aleksey Shlyapnikov has proposed, a sidebar API would give “an extension control over a sidebar panel – a per-tab split-pane HTML container with the ability to resize horizontally to the right of the main page content.”
It makes sense, since webapps are going to need as much flexibility as they can get from Chrome’s existing windows. Sidewiki, which is a Google-made extension that allows users to add additional content to web pages, could use this type of API; currently Sidewiki pops out under the extension as opposed to being a full sidebar.
You can read more about the experimental sidebar API here. In the proposal, Shlyapnikove says that sidebar functionality can be already be tested for development purposes by using the “–enable-experimental-extension-apis” switch.
You Want Sidebar Tabs in Chrome? Here’s How
Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 10 Comments
Many people have asked for the ability to move their tabs to the side in Google Chrome. This is a feature that first took off in Firefox, and fortunately the Chromium team has graciously put them into the early builds. Now, if you’re using Chrome 6 in the form of the development or canary builds, you can have sidebar tabs as well.
The first thing you need to do is add “–enable-sidebar-tabs” to your Chrome shortcut like this.
Open up Chrome again, and you can now right click on a tab and choose Use side tabs.
When I chose Use side tabs, my tabs simply disappeared, a strange sight for sure.
But when I hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab, they appeared on a sidebar to the left.
To revert to regular tabs, right click on an open tab and uncheck the Use side tabs option.
Once again, you’ll need to open a new tab to make them appear at the top – a little quirk that shows this feature still needs refinement.
I’m not sure what to think about sidebar tabs – I’ve never used them, so I am accustomed to using regular tabs on the top. I think the feature also need a bit of UI polish as well, but if you’re using Firefox just for the sidebar tabs, you might want to grab yourself the development build of Chrome and give it a shot.
