I wanted to write a note about one thing that annoys me in Firefox. I’ve found out that I like this feature called “Application Tabs” or “Pinned Tabs”, where you choose a tab and to be permanently displayed, but with only an icon and no close button.
The tabs have a few deal-breaker problems, though.
1. They sporadically disappear on restart
2. If I click on a link to an external site in an application tab, it will load the external site in the application tab, rather than a new tab. This makes it “not actually an application tab”.
I realize that it’s not always straightforward to know whether a new page is part of the same website or not, but web pages with a different hostname or top-level domain name are part of a different site the vast majority of the time. And a pattern match can be used for advanced users who want finer control.
3. If you are looking at a page in an application tab, and you use the browser’s URL bar or search bar to go to another site, it loads the new location in the app tab. This is unforgivable. With an embedded link there’s some question whether the link points a new site or not; if you go through the URL bar it’s obviously a new site and should load in a new tab.
This might be the thing that could push me over to Chrome, if if turns out its application tabs behave better than Firefox’s.
