tabs

Five 'tabs' stories May 2012 - August 2015

Latest Chrome Dev build now keeps media from autoplaying in background tabs

Stephen Hall Aug 26 2015 - 9:58 am PT

Background audio from a video or ad that starts playing in a tab you’re not using is arguably one of the most annoying experiences in modern web browsing. Slowly but surely, web browsers have started to recognize this annoyance and the Chrome team has been one of the best at introducing solutions. Chrome has an icon telling you which tab is playing the audio, recent builds of Chrome let you mute these annoying tabs with a single click, and now Google’s browser is introducing another feature: Backgrounded tabs will no longer autoplay media at all until you bring them into the foreground. Hallelujah.
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Here’s what happens when you open 100 tabs in Chrome for Android

Tom Maxwell Jun 26 2015 - 8:46 pm PT

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Google employs a lot of engineers. Most software engineers know that when you have a box which can contain a variable amount of content – say, an input field or the title section of a blog post like the one above – that you need to make a decision as to what happens when more content than can initially fit into the box is inputted. Maybe you take the lazy way out and simply limit what the user can do so that their input doesn’t end up exceeding the character limit of the box, for example. Google has done something even lazier in Chrome for Android.

Let me preface this by saying that what I’m about to show you isn’t new, but I just learned about it so I’m sure it’ll be new to some of you too. Also it’s Friday, so why not see some neat stuff. With that out of the way, here’s what it looks like when you have any amount of tabs open in Chrome for Android under 100 tabs (images courtesy of Reddit user /u/Hamsna):

Normal, right? Right. Here’s what it looks like when you have 100 or more tabs open:

Let me help in the event that you haven’t noticed anything different in that second image:

It seems that someone at Google decided that it’d just be more work than it’s worth to come up with a more pragmatic solution, so it used an emoticon instead to say¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And how many people actually use more than 100 tabs, in a mobile browser no less? Only psychopaths, probably.

How to overcome tab overload in Google Chrome using Tab Wrangler

Stephen Hall May 8 2015 - 11:29 am PT

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Tab overload.

One of the things I struggle with on a daily basis—and forgive me, I know it’s a first world problem—is an overload of Google Chrome tabs. I have a bad habit of just opening countless new tabs without even thinking, and I’m really bad about managing them and closing the ones I’m no longer using. Chrome just makes it way too easy to end up with a few dozen tabs open, while only actually using a few.

I figured it wasn’t possible that I was the only one that struggled with this. With just a quick Google search, I found a free Chrome extension called “Tab Wrangler” to help rectify the situation. It’s a nifty little plugin. Without hardly any set up, it will help manage your tabs for you and close the ones you don’t need—and it will even keep you updated on your negligence with a little red badge telling you how many tabs it has closed for you…
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Tip: Add muting to your Chrome speaker tab icons with one simple command

Seth Weintraub May 2 2015 - 6:32 am PT

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Screenshot 2015-05-02 09.34.30

The speaker icon in Chrome browser tabs is one of the amazingly helpful features that makes Chrome my default browser. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to mute a tab without going into the actual page that’s making all of the noise? It turns out that the Chrome team is actually working on such functionality and it is available as a beta product by putting the following URL into Chrome:

chrome://flags/#enable-tab-audio-muting

Once there, you’ll see a line like this:

Simply click “enable” and restart Chrome. I’ve been playing with it for about 30 minutes and it seems to work well but isn’t 100% effective on Adobe’s Flash volume according to a thread on the matter. As someone who usually steers clear of Flash, it isn’t a big deal and it makes life a little better.

Chrome Stable release will make tabs, browser preferences accessible everywhere

Élyse Betters May 15 2012 - 8:56 am PT

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[youtube=http://youtu.be/-WCASaYzUYs]

This morning’s Stable release of Chrome will soon allow access to open tabs across multiple devices in different locations.

The feature has been available in Chrome Beta since early April. It enabled users logged into Chrome to open browser tabs on one device while permitting access to them on separate devices from within the “Other devices” menu on the New Tab page.

“Say you’ve found an awesome recipe on your work computer while… ahem… working hard at the office. But when you get back home, you can’t quite remember if it was two teaspoons of baking soda or two teaspoons of baking powder,” wrote Software Engineers Raz Mathias on the official Google Chrome Blog while detailing the latest feature. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could pull up the same recipe on your home computer with one click?”

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