With the latest release I have fixed the most common cause (that I am aware of) of unwanted tab reordering/jumping. I'm pretty sure there are still at least a couple other (rarer) causes of this, so I'm still looking for those, as well as formulating a plan for how to prevent this problem completely going forward.

If my new plan works, then Sidewise should become immune to tab-jumping issues regardless of other bugs in Sidewise (or changes in Chrome) that can currently cause the problem.

For example, one general issue is that if Sidewise somehow fails to add a newly created tab to the tree (e.g. Chrome doesn't notify us about it), that can currently induce tab-jumping problems because Sidewise's tab order is out of sync with Chrome's tab order. My plan will prevent circumstances like this (which are essentially unavoidable as Google evolves the Chrome Extension API) from leading to the tab-jumping behavior.

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I really want to get this problem fixed but it is a difficult one to reproduce. So far I almost never see it occur here, and can't reproduce it reliably.

I'm going to try some new methods of "forcibly" causing Sidewise to do this bad tab-jumping behavior this week to see if I can trace down the exact cause and/or appropriate solution.

Definitely will be doing once I get a bit more of the core functionality I want in place and stabilized, and tidy up the code a bit -- still got a lot of //TODOs floating around ;)

Without making any guarantees I am projecting to open the code in 3-6 months.

Mouse wheel tab switching: planned.

Auto promote first child: planned.

Bookmarks sidebar pane: planned.

Better styling of tabs: can you explain?
Auto-collapse unfocused tree: can you explain?

I am working on a simple Windows-only .exe (written in AutoHotKey) which is  able to hide Sidewise's tray icon as well as fix the alt-tab problem.

The script isn't ready for release yet as it currently causes a couple bugs within Sidewise itself, most likely specific to minimizing/restoring the dock window and/or sidebar. It also needs a "automatically launch at startup" function. But the no-taskbar-button and hide-from-alt-tab-order functions otherwise seem to work correctly.

If you want to try the script out in its present state:

1. Download and install AutoHotKey 
2. Save the script file somewhere
3. Run the script file to enable the taskbar/alt-tab hiding functionality
4. To have it automatically run on startup, create a shortcut to the .ahk script file in your Windows Startup folder (Start -> Programs -> Startup).