Recently, GitHub enrolled me into one of their beta features, a new site wide navigation on github.com. I noticed something odd in their navigation sidebar. Their “Upgrade” link uses the “Outbox” icon.
The next day, I noticed that twitter.com uses the same icon for Sharing tweets.
This got interesting and I started looking for web pages where this icon was being used. Google’s Bard uses it to export responses.
Safari uses it to share a web page.
Font awesome suggests that it’s the “upload” icon.
iOS uses it for sharing a screenshot.
Google Chrome uses a variant of it for “upload” functionality.
LinkedIn’s iOS app uses it for post sharing.
So, I’m not sure what the right usage for this icon is. If someone familiar with it could enlighten me, that’d be great.
Earlier today, I submitted the new rewrite of my Chrome extension, Rearrange Tabs, to the Chrome Web Store. It’s pending review at this point. Personally, I’m very excited about this release. It fixes all the known issues around key combination conflicts and performance.
Originally, I wanted to just upgrade the extension to include the changes around migrating the extension from Manifest v2 to Manifest v3. As I started working on it, I took the opportunity to rewrite the extension and roll it out as 3.0.0. It seemed like a no-brainer.
Why the rewrite?
It’s been a while since I made any changes to the extension. The last time I rolled out an update was on April 26, 2020, v2.1.7. The extension has been stable, albeit with a few performance issues and bugs. So, I wanted to address them all in the same release and just bundled all the fixes in this release.
What’s included?
1. Migration from v2 to v3
Google has been pushing extension developers to upgrade to the latest Manifest v3. Google requires all the Featured extensions on Chrome Web Store to comply with the latest Manifest. The changes were minimal for the extension and the migration guide is very well documented. That helped a lot. Good job, Google!
2. Performance
Over the years, as new features got added, the extension accrued a few performance related issues. I’ve addresses them in this release. I will talk about them in-depth in a separate post. The debugging session was fun 🙂
3. Bug fixes
There were reports of bugs in the extension. I’ve addressed the most annoying and common ones. I hope this makes the users happy and enjoy using the extension. I just hope I didn’t introduce new ones.
4. Deprecating wrap around
The extension supported go around feature since v1. When a user moved a tab to the rightmost or the leftmost position of the browser window, any further movement in that direction would push the tab around to the other side. I’ve deprecated this feature. This seemed nice in the beginning when I introduced this, but I saw myself not really using it. Also, it seemed pointless since you can still use the “Move to front” or “Move to back” functions. The push-around-to-the-other-side just felt unnecessary.
5. New Updated Page
I’ve added a new page that shows up when your extension is upgraded from 2.x.x to 3.0.0 with the necessary info around the changes.
Future
I am planning on redesigning the logo for the extension and come up with a better demo to display on the extension page on the Web Store. The current one looks outdated, which it is. It’s from 2015. It has been the same since I created it. It’s time for an update.
<3
I definitely enjoyed working on this version of the update. Hope you all like the updated version of the extension. If you haven’t tried the extension yet, give it a shot here: Rearrange Tabs 3.0.0
My Google Chrome extension, Rearrange Tabs, hit the major milestone of 10,000 active users! I never expected this to happen and it goes without saying that I am elated.
I started the project so that I could move tabs around in the browser without having to use my mouse and to satiate my obsessive compulsiveness to arrange my tabs in a particular order. I decided to open source the code so that other users would benefit from it and maybe even build something better. To my surprise, I saw users contributing back to the project and adding new features, which was really cool. That’s the beauty of Open Source.
5.5 years later, the extension has now reached 10,000 active users. The fact that so many users actively use it and like it, makes me feel good.
Thanks to all the contributors of the project. Cheers to all of you and the extension’s userbase! 🥳 🎉
Exactly 2 years ago (Mar 22nd, 2015), on a Sunday afternoon, I wrote and open sourced Rearrange Tabs. I use it every single day. I find it pretty useful.
Here are a few interesting stats about the project:
Active Users: 1000+
No. of Reviews on Chrome Webstore: 28
Rating on Chrome Wesbtore: 5 stars
Stars on GitHub: 39
Forks on GitHub: 10
Clearly, these are not mind blowing. But they’re not bad either. Also, this is my first project where the code written by my contributors is more than the code I’d initially written. I hope more people use it and find it useful. :cheers:
OCD is weird. It makes a person do weird things. For instance, I find it annoying to have tabs not grouped by their purpose. When I’m working, I usually have the documentation opened in one tab (which usually is the left tab) and the tab to its right, absolutely, has to be the tab that’s running my local copy of the app that I’m currently working on.
I’m used to using the mouse to rearrange my tabs all the time. Sometimes, I have multiple windows open (if I’m at work, since I have a dual-monitor setup) at the same time. I’ve always wanted to have keyboard shortcuts that did all this. That’s the reason I wrote a new Google Chrome Extension called Rearrange Tabs.
Rearrange Tabs
Rearrange Tabs is a tiny Google Chrome Extension that you can install right now to use keyboard shortcuts to move your tabs around in your Google Chrome browser.
To move a tab to its left
Windows: Shift+Alt+Left
Mac: Ctrl+Shift+Left
To move a tab to its right
Windows: Shift+Alt+Right
Mac: Ctrl+Shift+Right
Edit: Previously the shortcut to move the tab on Mac was Alt+Shift+<Arrow>. I had to update this since it was overriding the word highlight shortcut and made it hard to edit text inside the browser. That is fixed now.
Edit 2: You can now customize your keyboard shortcuts to move the tabs.
To customize your keyboard shortcut by following these steps:
Open your extensions page (or visit chrome://extensions from your URL bar)
Scroll to the bottom
Click on Keyboard Shortcuts
Under the “Rearrange Tabs” section, you can configure whichever shortcut you want
Testing various Operating Systems has always been something that I enjoyed. This enjoyment of mine led me to install and test Operating Systems such as Mac OS X 10.6.2, Chromium OS, Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (Will be trying out Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat soon) and ofcourse my favorite Windows 7. Oh, and all these Operating Systems are installed on my Laptop (Dell Vostro 1320). I have taken the screenshots of all the installed Operating Systems on my laptop along with their default web browsers.
