Our favourite feature in Google Chrome

A couple of weeks ago I ditched Firefox to try Google Chrome.

There are lots of things I miss about Firefox, mostly add-ons that have not been ported to Chrome yet, but all of that pales next to what might be Chrome's most underrated feature. I don't know if it even has a name, I call it Chrome's "Tab-Resizing-After-Closing-Tabs-Adjacent-Attack-Delay" feature, or T.R.A.C.T.A.A.D for short.

I often have a dozen or more tabs open in the my web-browser. When I finish a task like updating a website I will often close a large bunch of tabs (website, CMS admin page, CSS compressor, SEO optimisers).

With Firefox I would have to take my time to close the tabs, because as I close each tab, the remaining tabs are resized instantly to fit the web-browser window uniformly. This means that I need to relocate my mouse a little to the right to find the "x" to close the next tab. I never thought much about it, it seemed to be the nature of having so many tabs open that I would have to deal with the results of dynamically resizing the tabs to fit.

The first time I finished such a job with Chrome, something magical happened. When I closed the left most tab all of the tabs slid to the left and the next tab that I wanted to close was directly under my cursor still, not a little to the right! Before I even realised how awesome that was I had closed six tabs already. I took a deep breath to control my excitement and then as I exhaled, the remaining tabs took their leave to resize themselves now that the excitement had died down. It was thrilling to watch.

I'll admit that this is just a very little thing but I was instantly sold on Chrome. It is not often that a computer gives me a user-experience that makes me giggle with appreciation. I really hope TRACTAAD brings you the same joy it has brought me.