Before
One of the irritating things about using Chrome is that when you have a large number of tabs open it becomes harder to know exactly which one to open without a lot of “trial and error”. As you can see here some of the tabs no longer display the favicon and some of the tabs all have the same favicon. Either way you go this is not good for quickly finding the tab that you want to view.
Setup
The options are not complicated to sort through but some minor adjustments may help to better personalize how Tab Menu works for you. The default “Keyboard Shortcut” is “Ctrl + m” but can be expanded by adding “Alt and/or Shift” to the combination. You will also be able to modify the appearance of the “Toolbar Icon” if desired. The default setting is for a “static icon” but can be changed to always display the number of tabs open or only display the number when hovering the mouse over the “Toolbar Icon”. You can see that the three tabs open in the “Tab Bar” are also shown in a “Tabs List” below the options.
There are two important points to keep in mind while using the extension:
The number of open tabs shown on the “Toolbar Icon” pertains to that particular window and its’ tabs only. Use of the “Keyboard Shortcut” will open the “Options Page” (instead of the drop-down window) and give you access to the “Tabs List” for a particular window there.
If you have the “Options Page” open you can also view an identical list in the drop-down window. One of the very nice things about this extension is that you can access the “Tabs List” in the manner that best suits your needs.
Tab Menu in Action
Now for the fun part. Here you can see our original window with its’ twenty-four open tabs and our second window with the other three tabs in it.
A close-up view of our “Toolbar Icons” and tab counts. The first thing that we decided to do was to combine all of our tabs into one window by clicking on “Merge Windows”.
One click later and all of our tabs were in the same window with an updated tabs count and a scrollbar for our “Tabs List” in the “Options Page”.
We decided to close one of the tabs shown in the list. The currently opened tab will have a powder blue color highlighting it and any entry you hover over will be lighter blue in color. Whichever entry you are hovering over will also have a “Close X” appear at the right end. Click the “X” and that tab will be instantly gone from both lists…
Hovering your mouse over an entry will also let you see the full title for that particular webpage.
Clicking on a particular entry will immediately focus that tab so that you may read the article, write that important e-mail, etc.
Perhaps you would prefer to conduct a search for a tab instead…just start typing the title/name/URL for the webpage in the text field and watch the list focus on possible matches for your query.
Conclusion
If you suffer from tab overload on a daily basis then Tab Menu will definitely help you to get control of your tabs back.
Links
Download the Tab Menu extension (Google Chrome Extensions)
