Extension experiment

Just recently I’ve been using Google Chrome more and more as my primary web browser, but there’s one thing that really frustrates me about it.

I tend to have a lot of tabs open, with around a dozen or so “would like to read” tabs and a widely varying number of tabs related to my current task. Even when I use several browser windows I soon find myself with 15 or more tabs in the current window.

As the number of tabs increases in a Chrome window you’re left with only the favicon by which to distinguish their contents, that’s if they have a favicon at all.

I decided that doing something about this would be a good opportunity to do a little light hacking and so set about writing a Chrome extension. It has been a couple of years since I wrote any JavaScript, and I still find the code I produce with it to be terribly ugly, but it only took an evening to whip something usable up.

There are a couple of things I’d like to fix:

  • Visually differentiate the active tab.
  • Visually differentiate pinned tabs.
  • Chrome gives focus to browser action popups and this falls through to the first anchor – I don’t like how this looks so need to do something about that. That being said I don’t actually think I want or need that element to be an anchor at all…

All that being said, I wrote this last night on the sofa and it’s already proving its worth. If I fix it up any more and figure out how to write less ugly JavaScript I may publish the code somewhere.

One comment

  1. Firefox distinguishes the active tab using bold. It also only displays if there are too many tabs to display nicely.

Comments are closed.