Too Many Tabs in Chrome? I Built My Own Browser to Fix It

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💡 Why This Matters

Your browser is where most of your workday happens. When you open enough tabs, the titles disappear and you spend time hunting for the one you need. A tab bar that shows you what you were just working on gives that time back.

Today I had a breakthrough on the problem of way too many tabs in Chrome, and I think it might be solved for good. I built my own version of Chromium, the open source browser Chrome is built on, so I can make the browser work the way I actually use it.

The problem with too many tabs

Every new tab squeezes the others. Open enough of them and the titles disappear, and you are left with a row of tiny favicons, trying to guess which one is which.

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The usual answer is vertical tabs. You get a column on the left side of the window, and every tab shows its full title. I tried it and loved seeing everything at once. I also felt lost. I really missed my tabs across the top.

Stair-step tabs

My fix is a third option I call stair-step tabs. Whatever tab you clicked most recently jumps to the far left and gets its full title. The tab after it is a little smaller, then the next one is smaller still, all the way down to the far right, where you only see icons.

Each tab takes as much space as it needs and no more. A short title stays short. A long one gets room to show itself, as long as you used it recently.

The result is that the tabs you are actively working in always have readable titles, and the ones you have not touched in a while step down out of the way. I still have the vertical list on the left when I want it, and I can collapse it to get that screen space back.

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Other changes while I was in there

Once you have your own browser, small annoyances become easy to fix. A few more things I changed:

Profile up top. My Chrome profile shows at the top of the window, so I can see exactly who is logged in. I use a lot of different profiles to stay logged in for different clients and test users, so this one gets used constantly.
Extensions on a second row. My extensions wrap onto a second row along the bottom of the toolbar, so they stay visible.
One-click social bookmarks. My social media sites open in a single click.

Your browser can change

Chromium is open source, which means anyone can take it and change how it behaves. That is what makes a project like this possible. These are the first few things I have changed so far. The point is that the browser you spend all day in does not have to stay the way it shipped.

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