by edvakf

A new trend that's capturing Japanese Opera users' hearts is to hide the tab bar.

I am one of those who already farewelled my tab bar months ago. In general, Opera users tend to open a large number of tabs, partly because Opera can handle the cache neatly even if hundreds of tabs are open unlike Firefox. When I had my tab bar shown, all I was seeing of the bab bar was tons of favicons trying find space for themselves.



The page title, which is the thing I was identifying the tabs, were unrecognizable. So I ended up clicking a few tabs before I reach the one I wanted to read.

One solution suggested would be to place tab bar on a side. This can be done by right-clicking on a tab bar and choosing [customize] from the menu, then choose placement to be either left or right.



One big problem of this is I can't see the tab I'm in if I was in the tab below the bottom of the window. I could use a window panel insted. There I can scroll down or search in tabs. I didn't simply do it becuase I didn't like having sidebars at all. (I didn't have a widescreen back then)

Then I read a blog post of someone who got rid of the tab bar completely. I have to admit that even I, who don't need the tab bar at all any more, had sceptic opinion about hiding the tab bar. My thought was, "How can I live without a tab bar?" Ever since I switched to my first tab browser, Mozilla, I depended so much on the tab bar. After a few weeks, for some motives I tried it. At first I felt weired --- I found myself glancing at the top of the window from time to time looking for "some" information. But after a day or two it became natural to me to have no tab bar any more.

What I use a lot instead of the tab bar is the tab cycle. I'm a keyboard guy, so I assigned tab cycle to something more easily accessible (instead of Ctrl+Tab & Ctrl+Shift+Tab). With mouse it's even easier. Opera has it's best mouse feature, Right-Click plus wheel cycle. In this tab cycle pop-up, you can have as many tabs as possible with the names, of course. Think about it, the cost of eye motion to look up at the tab bar and to see the tab-cycle pop-up is exactly the same. My window looks much wider now, not just phisically but mentally (a lot!), by not seeing extremely messy tab bar.

If you think this is a crazy idea, I want you to try it today. The browser window will look really cool. It's very easy to do it as well. You just need to go to appearance customize menu and hide tab bar. And this is optional, but check the "Open new tab next to active" on the [Advanced]>>[Tabs] menu. Finally, you might want to check Show Window Menu in opera:config page.