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Quote:
Originally Posted by Handycam
You do know they can be made as large as you like, right?
More accurately, they can be made as large as your available screen real estate will allow. And, bigger costs more....

On my desktop where I have multiple giant screens, big tabs themselves aren't a problem. On my 12" PB, however (or any other similarly tight screen - and there are still a *lot* of 1024x768 screens out there), you just can't make the tabs too big. Even without the tabs visible at all, it can be a challenge to read some sites that are designed for bigger screens, or even sites designed for smaller screens but which for some reason overflow their normal width (e.g., forums where people post wide images, often causing the whole forum to be just as wide). And let's not forget folks who may have bigger screens but who choose to keep their window sized less than full-screen.

Plus, even on bigger screens with full-size windows, bigger tabs come at the expense of the number of tabs you can display in one screen-full. Since I generally have at least a dozen tabs open in a given window, and often many more than that, this is important to me as I don't want to spend too much time scrolling up and down looking for a particular tab.

The bottom line: for light users with no more than a handful of tabs open at any given time and a big screen, their ideal solution is to make the tabs giant and be done with it. But for the more power-surfer type, this solution entails some major usability compromises. And in the case of OW, the only major pay-for browser remaining on the Mac, I suspect most users are of the latter type.