I am writing this for the second time. The first time was in 2019, and it looked like Google is going to let Windows and macOS users scroll through tabs using the scroll wheel. The feature request bug shows closed as “Won’t fix”. This could be changing.

If you are using Chrome on Ubuntu, you can already do this.

On the Windows 10 and macOS computers, this is not the case. At first, it looked like the developers had pulled this off:

However, later this code was rolled back. The reason? “it’s turned out to be surprising and troublesome.”

Looks like they are trying a different approach this time.

Extension API to toggle changing tabs with mouse wheel

The newest development, the code change request I mentioned, talks about adding an API.

Extension API to toggle changing tabs with mouse wheel: Implements a new uiSettings.scrollEventChangesTab extension API to toggle whether using a mouse scrollwheel over the tab strip will change tabs. Previously this feature was permanently enabled on Linux and disabled on all other platforms and the default values will stay the same.

It is not clear how this will be implemented. Will we get an option to enable this feature from Settings? Or are we going to see an official extension with scroll wheel browsing and more?

If you look within the code, there is a description that says “Use the chrome.uiSettings API to interact with the browser’s tab system. You can use this API to create, modify, and rearrange tabs in the browser.”

What do you think? Let me know in the comments section.

Source: Gerrit.