First off the newly added tab tooltip (the box that appears when you hover over a tab) is counterproductive and would become unnecessary with better design. I understand that it’s been added as a simple way for users to separate tabs if they’ve got multiple tabs open. Because currently multiple tabs in Brave means clutter. This is because each tab shrinks in size until the header is unreadable and the tab is almost unclickable. The design itself isn’t lacking features. It’s the core design that’s already there that is to blame. We don’t add features to repair something that is broken at the core. That only adds even more clutter. The tooltip is one more box I have to open and read in order to navigate the browser. There is a better solution than this. Firefox has it.
Firefox never makes tabs so small that they’re unreadable. Instead it adds tabs in a list one after another instead. A list that one can move back and forth in by clicking buttons on each side of the tabs, or by using the CTRL + TAB and CTRL + SHIFT + TAB quick commands (I’ll refer to these commands as “Tab Switching” from now on). Displaying the Favicon and 6-8 letters minimum should suffice to keep readability. This design accomplishes several things all at once:
The most important piece of information, the Favicon and the first 6-8 letters in a tab header, is always displayed. Users will be able to tell which tab it is using. This makes the tab tooltip unnecessary.
The clutter disappears completely because tabs barely change size and remain readable.
A “power user” like myself that loves Tab Switching can tell ahead of time when I want to stop Tab Switching (since I can still see most of the tab header). This allows me to switch tabs without having to hover my mouse over each tab.
Instead of the design making me feel like I need to limit my usage of tabs in the Brave browser (because if I have too many the design breaks) the Firefox list never encounters this issue. I can create tab after tab and the only limit comes from my PC, as it should be.
That’s why I think Brave would become a better browser with this feature added.
totally agree as very bad situation one gets into when too many tabs open i workaround that by opening new windows
Detecting good resolutions and automatically making the text size a lil smaller or two lines ;;
Instead of the design making me feel like I need to limit my usage of tabs in the Brave browser (because if I have too many the design breaks) the Firefox list never encounters this issue. I can create tab after tab and the only limit comes from my PC, as it should be.
Hats off
That’s great! I wouldn’t say it gets especially annoying with a lot of tabs though. A lot of tabs in itself with or without the hover card is a limited and cluttered design. I’ll try to edit my post to make the distinction clearer.
As a workaround for now you can disable chrome://flags/#tab-hover-cards this flag. This is not a solution just a workaround. If chromium decides to remove this flag then it will start showing the cards again.
Hello, I have been using Firefox for years.
The recent announcement Mozilla made in January was simply disgusting,
so I removed Firefox from all my devices and joined Brave.
I have seen numerous performance improvements in browsing and great minimalist design, as well as other small features I am discovering, are wonderful.
I do have some suggestions below that I kindly ask you to take the time to please read.
With many tabs open they become way too narrow
Fix: make tabs no less than twice or even 2.5 times the favicon icon width.
Active tab gets lost with numerous tabs open.
Fix: make a gradient stroke (from your logo) or solid around the tab edge or a horizontal line at the top for the active icon using the same gradient or solid colour.
Tab + button is all the way to the right when browsing controls are all the way
to the left side forcing long mouse movements.
Fix: place + button to the right of the bookmark icon, next to the address bar.
Browsing habits changed, I have not used bookmarks in ages, instead, I rely more on tabs to keep my sites of interest at my fingertips and type into the address bar what I want.
Fix: Create a button on the very top left to manage tabs with two buttons to the right up arrow and down arrow.
The button can show a grid of thumbnails of all the sites from the current tabs.
In this grid, you can delete, copy, duplicate, give star ratings and drag to organise the order of tabs, a tab counter near the top of the page with each thumbnail displaying the number in the order in the bottom left corner.
The up and down arrows at the top will allow you to move up or down through
the Tab Sets (see below).
Tab Sets is a group of sites you wish to keep together, for instance, you could have a Tab Set for Shopping compare prices etc another for news sites another for art or whatever you like with the up-down arrows you cycle through these sets.
You could then save these as your own profile so no matter who jumps on they could create their own profile and sets and not mess up your sets.
Naturally, you should have passwords so other people can not see your sites.
As a final step, you could even set restrictions to your children profile so they can only see the sites you allow them from the Tab Sets you allowed them.
These Tab Sets should also reduce the numerous tabs open issue.
Well, I hope this list hasn’t been too long for you and you can equally see the huge benefit from some of the points I have raised that will not only improve your browser but put you ahead of the curve of other browsers.
Agreed. I keep going back to firefox because of this issue. I love that firefox scrolls tabs left or right and that there is a drop down menu to select from among the open tabs. Earlier versions of Brave paged between groups of tabs. That was better than having tabs get smaller and smaller to infinity and beyond. I want to abandon firefox. They abandoned me. No browser I’ve tried has made this possible. Please make this possible, Brave. If I knew how to fix it, I would, and I’d do it for free.
Recently Alphabet Inc released two additional flags related to this issue, llok for Tabstrip in Chrome://flags, enable both of them and relaunch to get that FireMouse feeling. In Chrome Canary 90 it’s said you can pick the size of tabs in order to avoid them shrink to flea-size.
BTW, Brave should implement a Tab sync similar to FireRat or Vivaldi since the one in Chrome is utterly crude.
I agree with the concerns expressed regarding TAB size! When I have a lot of tabs they are so small, when I try to click on one it closes because it thinks i clicked on the “X”!
I’ll have to limit the number of TABS and open more Windows with different groups of interest, untill resolved.
Agreed!!! The tab functionality in this browser SuCKS right now. The really weird thing is that the default tab behavior in Googles Chrome is pretty good. That’s the kind of functionality I want to see in Brave. To keep my response short I will ask only 2 things:
Provide ability to search tabs like in Chrome. This is a godsend for people who have lots of open tabs.
Dont shrink tabs to infinity. This is a horrible solution. Pick a set number according to browser window size and at the breaking point either flip to a new page of open tabs or allow the scrolling like in Firefox.
It burns my 4$$ when I’m on a page and I can’t see the tab for it straight away at the top of the browser window. The tab for the current page should … ALWAYS … be visible!
I love this browser for its underlying philosophies about user privacy and all that jazz. But please get the !@$$^#$ tab functionality fixed soon.
Thanks for a good browser. Looking forward to a better browser!
Yes the small tab size is so annoying, but anyway implementing Tab Groups like in Safari 15 is the only UX acceptable solution. Apple really nailed it here!
I’m hesitating to go back to Safari just for this improved UX, shame that Brave is so much better otherwise.
