I sincerely suggest using vertical tabs! There's two popular FF extensions for it, the original Tree Style Tab [1] and Sidebery [2]. Most widescreen displays are far wider than web content these days, so you don't lose any horizontal space by switching to vertical tabs, and you gain the ability to actually read the text + organize them by hierarchy.
The post you were replying to isn't replying to an "opinion" or punching down on one. Instead, it is answering the question "Why in the world would anyone actually LIKE the tiny tiny icon-only tabs?"
I personally don't, but I know a lot of people who deal with large amounts of tabs and prefer icons because they can quickly glance over the icons to get to the page they want. I know one guy who has probably 50+ tabs open at any given moment but can still get to whichever tab he wants to out of instinct by going "oh that was in the 5th google sheet tab". I deal with that by not having more than a dozen tabs and grouping in TST but I gotta admit, it's an impressive skill to have.
Do people actually prefer to memorize website favicons and their placement instead of scrolling with some text still visible to let you know what the tab actually is?
This is what I was wondering also, and it makes me think other people look at a much larger range of sites with different icons than I do.
I use Chrome at work because I have to. I often get into the situation with icon-width tabs, and to me it's bad because a lot of my tabs are the same few sites. So the icon doesn't always help me, and I end up using the 'close all tabs to the right' feature a lot.
In addition, a lot of the sites I use at work have time-limited sessions, so going back to a tab from even a couple of hours ago isn't useful because I have to reauth anyway. I guess I could find an old tab and refresh, but I usually just 't' (with vimium) to open a new one and retype the address instead. Maybe for me this is more a preference for the keyboard vs. having to move a pointer around?
This is a great question, and I think the trouble here is that there is a temptation to answer with one off anecdotes from the idiosyncratic example of a single use case. The more peculiar, individualized, unique, and unrepresentative, the more likely it is that we're going to hear that.
This temptation is very strong on HN. I honestly would be fascinated by a blog that gathered together all the extremely specialized use cases that people use as examples of why product XYZ wasn't good enough. That way of thinking leads to interesting to discussion but needs to be tempered by stepping back and looking at how representative those examples are, and I think that step is the point in the process where these conversations always break down.
You can change when the overflow scrolling starts by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 50 (or any number you want, the unit is pixels) in about:config
> help your parents, brothers and sisters, neighbors, uncles and aunts to do the same.
One sec let me try to explain how to do this to my grandma who is currently x thousand miles away. Oh yea and if something breaks good thing I'm there for tech support amirite.
>Why does you grandma care about when tabs start overflowing?
Oh she doesn't. The issue Grandma, Uncle Fat, Cousin Lou all have is they used this thing and started getting used to it and then they got an update and someone changed everything and they don't know how to do anything anymore. Repeat this three or more times and when you tell them to use something they smile at you and nod then stick with Chrome because it's something they know how to use and doesn't change all the time.
Because grandmas are fictional personas so you can say whatever feature X of software Y is your pet peeve is broken, flawed and it's the most important feature ever.
Because when the tab bar is full Firefox will overflow them while chrome will resize every tab until only an icon is left and then start the overflow.
If there is an extension to fix this I’ll switch but last I looked I couldn’t find any