There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but it doesn't work well once you get beyond a certain number of tabs (the number will vary depending on your screen size, etc., blah). At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs. Firefox, at least, doesn't have that issue, thanks to the scrolling tab bar. And the drop-down that shows all your tabs is, to me, a sufficient answer to the "my tabs are hidden from me" concern.
I understand that some people will feel differently of course. And it's less of an issue in the first place if you don't keep ludicrous numbers of tabs open.
>At some point, all the tabs are scrunched down to being indistinguishable blobs.
I don't know what you're on about. I opened the maximum number of tabs that my browser window can have visible (~90) and at no point were they indistinguishable blobs. Every single one still had a favicon.
To me, nothing but a favicon is exactly "an indistinguishable blog" since it does nothing to help me distinguish between the 10 arxiv.org tabs, or 7 or 8 Youtube tabs that I have open. shrug
This is something that bothers me when pair programming or working with co-workers who use a lot of tabs. I have to watch them fiddle between 10 jira tabs until they find the ticket. God forbid they misclick a few times (every time!) and then you get to see them hit a few other websites while all in the search of that only holy jira ticket tab.
Favicons alone aren't really enough though. I routinely have multiple tabs open for Wikipedia, Youtube, Arxiv.org, Jira, Reddit, and even HN.
With Firefox, you get the Favicon and at least the first few characters of the page title. And if you use the tab drop-down, you see all, or most, of the title (depending on how long it is).
I don't know what to tell you then. I'm typing this comment right now using Firefox, with a tab-bar full of tabs, and every visible tab has the favicon and a portion of the title visible. The rest can be found in the drop-down, with nearly the entire title displayed.
Maybe there's some setting that controls this behavior, but my Firefox is pretty much completely stock. shrug
Interesting. Maybe we're running different versions, or maybe it's somehow dependent on screen resolution or something. Weird. For me, Firefox has always displayed at least the first few characters of the title.
I was going to say that the favicons on Chrome probably disappear at some point too, but you're right. Chrome guarantees at least half a favicon on display, but to do so, new tabs are not put on the tab-bar. They're completely hidden with no way to access them via the tab-bar.
Yeah, that is not really optimal. However, that is luckily only a problem on a very high number of tabs. Firefox's tab UI starts having usability issues at a much higher number. At my tested width.
You can scroll on the tab bar.