Bit of a drive by, but I'm wondering if we are comfortable exposing this setting in chrome://settings? It doesn't appear to be... and if not, why does it make sense to expose this as an extension API? This seems like a very specific API that ends up being a hidden about:config that we've said we wanted to avoid.

I can't speak for this specific setting, but in general, we view extension APIs as the approved surface for configurability that we don't want to surface in the settings.

There are cases where we would choose not to even add an extension API, because it would have too large of an effect on the code, but if that's not a blocker, then from a UI perspective we're happy to let extensions be the surface by which people make Chrome more configurable and customizable, rather than settings.

pkasting@ said it better than I could. :)

Thanks! The necessary code changes should be very small as I only have to replace the constant that currently enables the functionality with a preference and expose it as a ChromeSetting via the extension api.

(Link to the api proposal: https://docs.google.com/document/d/10IXmEQZX4NTSKQMGafaA2X8BLVSLMTOSM46aEMPyIQY/edit?usp=sharing)

 Issue 407051  has been merged into this issue.

 Issue 383746  has been merged into this issue.

Has there been any progress on this? I neither see an option in Settings or chrome://flags

I use an Apple Magic Mouse - which is touch - an I constantly accidentally scroll tabs. It's a real nuisance.

Thank you everyone!

I'm currently not working on this but I would still like to add an option to make this behavior configurable. 

We never came to a conclusion about which extension api this could be added to. chrome.tabs is usually used to create or modify tabs and not change the behavior of the tab strip. All the other apis seem even more unrelated. chrome.accessibilityFeatures was a candidate as well as it has multiple settings to modify the behavior of Chrome but that API is only available on ChromeOS.
Devlin, what do you think? Would adding this to chrome.tabs be ok?

A flag to override the default behavior would work as well but that is not really what flags should be used for.

hey,
... any news?
i use touchpad two finger gesture and this tab scrolling is a pain in the bottom :-(
(Came here by reading through multiple issues... started with #529485)

Recently moved to Linux and this is a right pain!  
I've checked and can't see any extensions that resolve the issue.

I suggest that this feature be temporarily removed until there's bandwidth to make it configurable through UI.

If anyone else finds this behavior to be as frustrating as I find it -- for me, it basically manifests as the browser switching tabs randomly and without warning when I'm trying to scroll around the page -- there's a solution, albeit one that requires recompiling Chromium from source:

https://superuser.com/a/843598/33374

... I stopped using Chrome because of this. Only solution I could find... 

It still seems very strange that the UX should be so wildly different:

macOS/Windows: browser stays on the intended tab
Linux: browser switches tabs randomly when two-finger scrolling on a touchpad

...and it seems especially strange that the difference is mandatory unless one has the time/skill/commitment necessary to edit source code and recompile Chromium.

Things are that way because the Linux owners said that is system native behavior and overrode me repeatedly when I asked for us to be consistent and not do this.

That's so strange.

Perhaps these specific individuals don't use two-finger touchpad scrolling, and their pointing devices require some kind of a highly deliberate side-scrolling action?

If that's the case, I'd argue that their specific case doesn't generalize well to ordinary users.

I have two finger scrolling disabled and this behaviour still makes no sense at all. It switches tabs so quickly it's hard to imagine there's anyone who does this on purpose, certainly not with a touchpad. It happens with both vertical and horizontal scrolling too.

Could it be disabled perhaps at least for touchpad/high precision events to start with? There's been some improvements related to telling those apart from mousewheel scroll in #599497 I think it's not unreasonable to leave this in for discrete mousewheel scroll events only.

"System native behavior" can still be plenty broken. The Linux owners are wrong.

So, this feature exists for the tiny minority of computer users who still use deskop computers with old fashioned mice? Do they still have those clicky scroll wheels from the 1990s?

I just don't get it, at all. Does anyone actually like and use this behavior?

BTW, tab switch on scroll is NOT happening on ubuntu mate 18.04. I tried firefox, gedit and caja (the built-in file browser), neither of those switch tabs when scrolling with either touchpad or mouse. The only place I found where it does happen is the terminal.

Also, on  Issue #1316  no one mentions the touchpad, so I just assumed those people would want to have this feature for mousewheel only.

> the tiny minority of computer users who still use deskop computers with old fashioned mice

What else would you use with a desktop computer?

> Does anyone actually like and use this behavior?

Yes!

> What else would you use with a desktop computer?
A smooth scrolling mouse. Preferably weighted.

Some web pages are extremely long and a free spinning weighted scroll wheel is essential to navigate those pages quickly and smoothly. An "Old Fashioned" indented scroll wheel is outdated for a reason. 

They would however be great for scrolling through tabs. I can see why someone might like this if that's what they use. In either case, there should be an option so it can be set for the use case and not be a disruption if you don't use this "Feature".

Chrome/Chromium should not have this set as a non changeable default.

Regardless of the debate over the feature's usefulness with mice, it's broken as heck on a trackpad. There's no way to get the required accuracy for the feature to be useful. So the feature turns into a trap whereby trackpad users get to lose their tab every time the mouse pointer drifts over the row of tabs, and then they two-finger scroll. Very frustrating after the 500th time, especially with no way to disable it.

I fully agree that this feature is annoying for some people and extremely useful for others. 
Sadly I won't have time to work on this in the near future, so I'm removing myself from this bug and changing it to available if someone else would like to work on it. 

There is a CL [1] and an API [2] proposal but we couldn't reach an agreement on the specifics of the api and which namespace to use. As an alternative it would be possible to add an api for extensions to receive scroll events on the tabstrip and then remove the feature from Chrome. This was my first approach [3]

[1] https://crrev.com/2625113002
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/10IXmEQZX4NTSKQMGafaA2X8BLVSLMTOSM46aEMPyIQY/edit?usp=sharing
[3] https://crrev.com/2600343002

> There is a CL [1] and an API [2] proposal but we couldn't reach an agreement on the specifics of the api

Looks like some were against exposing onMouseScroll [3] but I don't see any disagreements about the on/off style API [1] in the code reviews. 

> which namespace to use. 

If I understand correctly the two people who commented on the proposal were happy with using ChromeSetting instead, which has been already done in [1]

ChromeSetting is a way to implement an extension function that manipulates settings, not a namespace. 
The plan was to use chrome.tabs. The alternatives are listed here: https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/api_index

From reading through this again, it really looks like the only thing missing is an approval from the extensions team. 

rdevlin.cronin@: Are you fine with using chrome.tabs? 
Would it help if I file an extension review bug to get some progress with this?

Here on the desktop I think this behaviour is nuts... "What happened? Why is Mark mad at me? Oh, I see, I typed a comment into his home page instead of Ralph's. But I thought I was looking at Ralph's home page. Well at least I didn't say anything dirty."

> I fully agree that this feature is annoying for some people and extremely useful for others.

This feature is useful for some people and extremely annoying for others.

Worse is when you have opened several tabs of your favorite shopping site.
You send in an order for 100 kilograms of bat guano, instead of cream puffs.
You only realize the error when a guest bites down...

Yes you should always double check the top of the page, as who knows
when a similar page might slide into place, even on desktop, due to your
hand sliding into the forbidden zone (tab strip) when scrolling.

Adventure 2: You send $xxx,xxx to client B, instead of client A, due to
same problem.

OK, don't get angry. I'm just saying this is a ticking time bomb. And
victims won't usually figure out what happened.

The common consensus will be that banks will start putting warnings:
"Before transferring money, be sure to close all other browser tabs!"

And even enforcing that their bank is the only tab in the whole browser,
from the start, via some javascript, perhaps.

So far, my actions have been:
(1) Attempt a custom build with the tab-scrolling behavior disabled
(2) Run out of time
(3) Switch to Firefox when using Linux