Interesting development over on Chrome for Android[1], re: the current incarnation of page-tabs. Wondering if anyone else has seen this.
A couple of years back, the top-of-window 'tabs' (very handily rearrangable) became a drop-downable tab-list (
not rearrangable, and initially "new 'tabs' to the bottom", until probably people complained and they made it make it top-of-list addition. (The obvious drag-to-re-order method, often employed, does not work. Closing and recreating a tab shoves it to the 'new'/top-end, but that's a fudge.)
Maybe a year back, they introduced 'tab groups', which essentially filled a single tab-list slot with a series of pages that could be accessed, within thst group, by bottom-of-window (transient, you sometimes had to fiddle a bit) string of tabs-in-this-group. Almost like tabs used to be (still no re-ordering!), although jumping into a group from other top-level tab(groups) in the big vertical tab-list page present a secondary vertical tab-list for which sub-group member.
What with having various long-term tabs (of whatever era) just hanging around - though not as many as I have here in Firefox!
- it's messy, but you learn to live with it. The group-tab switch is also useful to bring up the onscreen keyboard when it refuses to[2].
(And, long
after that last update that rejigged everything, it started to flash up a highlight of the button used to do top-level tab-switching with a hint-bubble to
tell me what it's for ("Open tabs to visit several pages at the same time."), like I'm a first-time user. I think some internal 'intro' flag has been set in a way that nothing I do proves that it can now be unset. Really awful change-control by the developers...)
So now suddenly, and
without apparent app-update (not even silently, SFAICT) the tabgroup situation has vanished, all its members folded intothe main tablist. The first in the group is now first in the list (not sure if that's because I created it anew, while trying to work out what was going wrong), the rest every tabgroups' members now sit (ungrouped) between the ungrouped tabs, in the gaps where the groups they cam from were. Long-hold menu still features the "Open in new tab in group" option as well as "Open in new tab", but whether that happens (and the result just appears flattened) or it now has no groups go to, I haven't yet decided.
More testing, later. For now, I just want to record my situation somewhere, and the official fora/etc are godawful, I've never been able to get on with them, so you lucky people get first refusal on telling me that I'm the one that's doing it wrong. Probably in so many ways! But
you know how things are...
Addendum: Adding a new tab (once again) sends it to the bottom of the list again, so the first group-tab tab that made it to the top of the master-tablist was clearly its own idea, not my messing about trying to understand things.[1] Almost exclusively used for Wiki editing and any incidental jump-off links I follow.
[2] Sometimes, when putting the focus into a textarea edit box (and
only in Chrome) the onscreen keyboard does not pop into existence, however long one waits. Cut/Copy/Paste works, if that's all I need, but to unstick it 'properly' I can change tabs (within subgroup or not) and return and hey-presto it materialises for use. That's
definitely not an intended operational feature. But you get used to it...