Google Chrome 4 goes live with extensions: How much closer to Firefox now?

Overcoming the too-many-tabs problem

The problem with having more space is that you eventually run out of it anyway. Opera introduced the world to tabbed browsing, which made sense until we all started running out of tab space. Firefox has add-ons that offer users a few ways to overcome this dilemma -- or more accurately, to buy more time until they encounter it again. But not only is Firefox functionally extensible, but structurally as well: add-ons such as Tab Mix Plus can actually replace Mozilla's design with three rows of tabs, and other add-ons let users stack tabs up vertically.

For now, this ability to rebuild the proverbial airplane while it's in flight, does not appear to be something Google wants to support with Chrome. So although Chrome 4's frosted tabs are handsome, in a professional setting, as more and more of them are open, they become too small. Soon your tabs are all entitled M..., A..., R..., and so forth; and the only way to see which one means what, is to fish through them sequentially.

Already, there are three approaches to this solution for Chrome that address the overcrowded horizontal tabs in a vertical way. Presented in order from minimalist to stylized: Tab Switch Plus brings up a drop-down menu listing all the open tabs, with full and legible titles. Tab Menu adds the ability to rearrange the tab order in Chrome's tab bar left-to-right by dragging and dropping them within the drop-down menu top-to-bottom, and also provides a text box for searching for text in open tabs' title bars. And VerticalTabs 2.0 (pictured right) offers all these features, with a little more graphical polish. (In our tests, perhaps VerticalTabs could be improved by not doling out search text entries as individual letters, so that "Fastest," for instance, doesn't match an entry that happens to have an "F," an "a," an "e," two "s's," and two "t's.")

A completely different approach to the tab management problem is offered by a very appropriately named extension, TooManyTabs. Another import from the Firefox world, this provides a graphically rich pop-up menu that depicts all your open tabs almost like school kids being lined up in assigned seats in a classroom. When your class is overflowing, as it were, you can actually take open tabs out of the lineup and stick them in a "Suspended Tabs" bar, almost like sending them to the principal's office. This makes more space on your tab bar for tabs you're using at the moment.

It's a very un-Google-like approach to the problem, especially with its slick background colors that can be instantly changed using a palette in the lower left corner. Obviously, the design was originally intended for users who like to show off their browsers, which typically doesn't describe the Chrome crowd. However, it's Chrome that may benefit most from the type of functionality that TooManyTabs provides. It was a little wonky in some of our tests, sometimes freezing up and not responding to clicks. But it didn't crash, nor take the browser down with it; all we needed to do was click outside the menu to close it, and click the extension button to reopen it. Chrome Showcase is a simpler alternative that shows thumbnails of open tabs in a box, and lets you click one to move it to the front.

The one category of Chrome extension we'll keep our eyes on more intensely is session management, which I've said before Chrome severely lacked. Two in this category worth mentioning thus far is Session Manager, which is both plainly-named and plainly executed, but has received good reviews thus far; and Fresh Start, from the developer of TooManyTabs, which has a little more graphical polish.

The big buildup

The reason this is a category to watch is because session management becomes most useful -- as is the case with Firefox -- in recovering from crashes, which Firefox does with aplomb. If Chrome doesn't crash as often as Firefox, the usefulness of session management is reduced more to: 1) re-opening pages you use most frequently, and 2) saving a session before logging off or shutting down your computer normally. So if neither FreshStart nor Session Manager (for Chrome) take off, that might not necessarily be a bad thing.

Thus far, Google has pulled off its first round of extensions for Chrome in its typical, unassuming Google way. Specifically, it's dumped them onto the public like a boy turning over his box of Legos on the floor, and let users plow through the pieces to find the ones that strike their fancy. You'd think Google, of all companies, would refine the categorization and search experience here. But a search for Search Box in the new Extensions gallery pulled up Search Box only as item #15 in the list, on the second page; only by making the query into "Search Box" (with quotation marks) did it rise to #2. What's more, user-defined themes are thrown into the mix with extensions, so when you go searching for one, you're liable to find the other.

Mozilla's add-ons gallery has been developed into an interesting browsing experience; Google's version, by contrast, looks like a bargain basement blowout sale for socks. One more lesson Google could learn from its Android experience is that community is a feeling, and feelings are something that users have to be given continuously -- it's not something they just sign up for by checking the box on the EULA and clicking on "Install."

Nevertheless, the official incorporation of add-ons to the stable version of Chrome does make it feasible, for the first time, for many regular users to build their browsers into the functional equivalent of what they use with Firefox. And that's extremely important, because from the beginning, Chrome has appeared to have the more stable and faster chassis. If there's still a functionality gap between Chrome and Firefox today, closing it entirely is no longer something that Google has to accomplish alone.