Chrome: ‘New Tabs At End’ Puts New Tabs at the End

Never has a title been more self-explanatory.

Chris Finke, who has previously developed killer Firefox add-ons like TwitterBar, ScribeFire, and the innovative TapSure for mobile Firefox, recently brought some much-needed functionality to Google’s Chrome web browser: the ability to open new tabs at the end of the tab bar, just like Firefox.

If you have a group of tabs open in Google Chrome and open a new tab from an existing tab, its child tab will open to the right of the parent. This keeps tabs groups logically, but with a busy tab bar it can be nearly impossible to figure out where your new tabs are appearing. This can be especially frustrating when opening links while browsing Twitter, since the new tabs won’t have similar favicons to visually differentiate them from existing tabs.

New Tabs At End does exactly what it says – it forces any new tab top open as the last tab on the right. This means that any freshly opened tab will be easy to find by glancing to the top right of your browser, and certainly helps me find what I’m looking for when I’m on a tab binge.

I understand why Chrome displays a new tab next to its parent by default, but with the limited functionality of a horizontal tab bar it only makes things more confusing. The single most important add-on I use in Firefox is Tree Style Tabs, which groups tabs vertically but also displays them in hierarchical trees so it’s easy to deal with groups of tabs with multiple parent-child relationships.

Chrome has been slowly working on their own flavor of vertical tabs, and I’m hoping they can come up with something similar to Tree Style Tabs when the feature is officially rolled out.