Update: Linux users can already do this. (thanks Alejandro Leone)
Here is a nifty feature coming to Google Chrome soon. If you are/were a Firefox user, you already know about this. Also, this feature was first requested way back in 2008.
Here is the code commit that I noticed today:
Activate the next/previous tab on horizontal scroll
This CL allows us to use mouse with horizontal scroll function,
such as tilting wheel or separate wheel for h-scroll.
Bug: 2384
The bug that was submitted as a feature request dates back to Sep 16, 2008, (14 days after Chrome was launched) and uses Firefox’s feature (which is quiet normal, isn’t it? You have a new browser and you look at your previous browser and say, hey, I want that feature here too!) to make a case for such a feature in Google Chrome.
My mouse has a scroll-wheel. The wheel can tilt left and right.
In Firefox, with multiple tabs open, I am able to click on a tab so that it
gains focus (visually a box-marquee around its title), then I can navigate
to adjacent tabs by simply nudging the tilt-wheel left/right. With any tab
selected, I can use the scroll-wheel to navigate up and down the page in
combination with this tilt behaviour. This works so long as I do not click
anywhere inside the browser page, in which case the focus would become lost from tab to page.
This is very useful and would be great to see in chromium.
I don’t usually keep more than 10 tabs open. However, I know people who keep plenty of tabs open all the time (James, I am not talking about you obviously). I am sure those of you who keep more than a handful fo tabs open during their typical browsing sessions will appreciate this feature.
It is also interesting to see the team going back to feature requests submitted during Chrome’s infancy and trying to implement them.
It might take a while before this feature shows up in Canary channel or Dev channel. Stay tuned for more updates on this!
