This is extremely helpful, thank you very much. This should accelerate the release of this script as an installable EXE significantly.

Unfortunately I have been unable to reproduce this crash. What OS/Chrome version are you running?

Also, can you try adding the following arguments to your Chrome launching shortcut?

--disable-accelerated-2d-canvas --disable-accelerated-compositing --disable-accelerated-layers 

I have had Sidewise mysteriously crash on certain websites in the past and found through trial and error that it was something to do with Chrome's GPU rendering; adding the above flags prevented the crashes.

If that fixes the problem, please try upgrading or reinstalling your video drivers; that was what eventually fixed the problem for me.

I strongly suspect the cause is an incompatibility with Chrome 21.x. I believe the current stable version of Chrome is 23.x - are you able to upgrade?

Thank you for your thoughtful post and screenshot. It's always helpful to me to see how people are actually using Chrome/Sidewise. To your specific points:

• Compact UI: Theming support is planned to be added in the medium-term, and I will include a "Compact" theme when that is done. As a partial "until then" solution, one thing you could do is press Ctrl+- or Ctrl+wheeldown to lower the zoom-level of everything in the sidebar, which produces a result that is fairly close to your custom-CSS solution. Chrome appears to remember the chosen zoom level for the sidebar between restarts.
  
  
• Window titling: to clarify, are you looking for Sidewise to set the title of each Chrome window to match the associated window-row's label, e.g. "Maya MEL"?
  
  Unfortunately this is probably not feasible, because Chrome itself sets the window titles to match the last-active-tab's title in each window, and does not give extensions a mechanism to explicitly set/override the window title. To implement this, then, would require retitling the last active tab's title in each window, which could make finding a desired tab by title more confusing, even if Sidewise were to visually retain the correct 'actual' title for each page row in the tree.
  
  One thing you can do currently is to click a window row in the sidebar to focus that window, without changing which tab is focused within that window. But it sounds like this probably isn't quite the solution you're after.
  
  Do you think showing a "secondary" focus effect on page rows which were focused within non-focused windows be a viable solution? To see what I mean, focus a page row which is a child of another page row in the tree, then collapse the parent page row; you should then see a "dashed border" effect on the parent row which is meant to indicate that  one of its non-visible children rows has the focus. Perhaps the same kind of effect could be applied to the last-focused tab in non-focused windows.
  
  
• Raise Sidewise when focusing any Chrome window: I think this is actually something that could be done internally by Sidewise. Currently, it is set up so that it only raises the sidebar when the dock window gets focused; this was done intentionally because I found that with multiple windows potentially located across multiple monitors, having the sidebar  raised after any Chrome-window-focus could be unexpected or annoying in many use cases. But it would be a pretty simple change to Sidewise to add a "Raise the sidebar when any Chrome window is focused" option, which would be subordinate to the "Keep Sidewise visible next to the dock window" option. Would this do what you're looking for?
  
  

if (wParam == 32772 && Class == "Chrome_WidgetWin_1" && Title != "Sidewise") {
    WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, On, Sidewise ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1
    WinSet, AlwaysOnTop, Off, Sidewise ahk_class Chrome_WidgetWin_1
}

Let me know how you go!

Yes please if you could. The information about smart-focus causing the issue is very helpful though and gives me a pretty good idea of what is going wrong. But the diagnostic report should give me about as clear a picture as it is possible to get, without me actually coming over to your house :P

Can you please do this?

- Go to Sidewise options page, click "show advanced options"

- Check the "Enable diagnostics" checkbox near the bottom

- Reproduce the problem you are describing

- Switch back to the options page and click the "Send diagnostic report" button

- You can then uncheck "Enable diagnostics".

Hopefully this will send me a detailed enough log of what happened for me to identify the cause of the problem. Thanks!

Can you give me a specific list of steps that cause the problem for you? Like "1. Press Ctrl+T. 2. Type the following..." etc.

I can't seem to reproduce the problem here but maybe I'm not doing it the right way to cause the problem.

-- also, can you confirm you are running the current version of Sidewise? You can check it by going to the Sidewise options page, and in the upper right corner if you are on the current version it should say "Version 2012.11.23.0". 

If it does not show that, you can force Sidewise to update by right clicking the Sidewise icon next to the address bar -> click Manage Extensions -> check the "Developer mode" checkbox in the upper right -> click "Update extensions now" button just below that checkbox. It should then take about 10 seconds to update.

It should now be possible to drop dragged rows either above or below the tree's rows and have it work as expected.

Note that this still does not allow you to drop anywhere below the tree rows -- the "below the tree" drop zone is a few hundred pixels tall. In the next release I plan to extend this to any of the whitespace below the tree rows -- so I am marking this as STARTED for now and will change it to COMPLETED once I make this further change.

This should be working as expected in today's new release (2012.11.23.0). Please let me know if it is not working 100% of the time for you now! :)

That is quite strange. Can you check if the new version of Sidewise released today is still exhibiting this problem for you?