Google Chrome's mystery sawtooth tabs have (slightly) changed my life
Are you seeing what we're seeing?
When I say "I work on the internet," I don't mean it in an "I have a lot of email" kind of way.
I mean my beefy homebuilt computer is constantly running out of memory -- because I might have 100 browser tabs open at any given time.
But a month or two ago, Google Chrome gave me an unexpected gift that kinda sorta changed my life: Sawtooth browser tabs that let me keep track of the ridiculous stack of webpages I've opened.
I hope I'll be able to keep them.
Before and after
Used to be, there was an annoying practical limit on how many browser tabs you could use at a time, because you wouldn't be able to tell them apart. It looked kinda like this:
Technically, this is on a Mac, but you get the idea.
But since Chrome v66 or so, I've been seeing the sawtooth tabs instead on my Windows PC, and oh -- oh -- are they so much easier to manage. I can pin browser windows side by side, each full of tabs, without losing track of what I'm doing.
And with a standard 24-inch 1080p monitor, I can fit a staggering 114 tabs on a single screen at a time.
Sad thing is, I don't know if these wonderful tabs are actually here to stay, and Google isn't saying.
Last month, my colleague Stephen Shankland had to switch to Chrome's experimental Canary build to see them on his Mac:
I now see a jaggy array of super-skinny sawtooth tabs on @googlechrome Canary. I still think Chrome handles tab overflow better than anyone else, but I know preferences vary. When did these shark teeth arrive? pic.twitter.com/Pky30B5CBw
— Stephen Shankland (@stshank) May 4, 2018
And now, he says he's not seeing them anymore in Chrome Canary.
But I just checked my wife's Mac and she's got the sawtooth tabs too, in her stable build of Chrome. Go figure.
Are you seeing these sawtooth tabs?
Google didn't immediately reply to a request for comment today. The company declined to comment last month.