When I've got a bunch of files open, with the tabs visible, and they take up more than the window width, the little left/right triangle buttons show up. They currently are supposed to allow me to switch from one tab to the next in the given direction of the button.
A problem I'm noticing is 3-fold:
1. The user usually doesn't need to switch from file to file this way. If they've gone and reached for the mouse, they may as well just click on the tab itself to get the file.
2. If the user is editing a file in a tab far to one side, and wants to go to a tab that's obscured on the other side, they need to either repeatedly click that triangle button to get there, or else resort to using the Open Files tab (or else use a Ctrl-Pg{Up,Dn} key to "round the horn" to get there).
3. There seems to be a bug where, when I click the triangle button, it moves over multiple files at-a-time, passing through two or more as it goes.
To me, Firefox's behaviour (when using tabbed browsing) makes more sense: the triangle/arrow widget buttons horizontally scroll the *view* of the tabs, rather than switching you from tab to tab.
Also, since Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn nowadays let you wrap around to the tab on the other end of the row, I think it would be useful to have:
Shift-Ctrl-PgUp -- gets you all the way to the tab on the far left Shift-Ctrl-PgDn -- gets you all the way to the tab on the far right
where, if the tab on the far left was obscured, and you hit Shift-Ctrl-PgUp, it would also automatically slide the view of the row of tabs all the way to the left, so you could see the tab you just switched to.
---John