I've released a new version today. Can you check and see if this problem still occurs for you? Thanks.

This should be fixed with today's release.

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.

Unfortunately Chrome gives no mechanism for an extension developer to hide the native Chrome tabs.

I've been thinking about this problem for a long time, and the best idea I've had so far is to periodically release a customized build of Chrome/Chromium that adds this functionality as a user-controlled toggle.

This would be quite an undertaking, so I would currently put it on the "nice to have, but no current plan to implement" list.

Another potential strategy is to run the main Chrome window in fullscreen (F11) mode and then position the Sidewise window overtop that. This comes with its own set of complications, however (not the least of which is it would only work if you run Chrome maximized normally).

Maybe. The trick here would be in the fact that pressing F11 makes the main Chrome window fill the entire space of the screen. If we then overlaid the Sidewise window over that (which is possible), some part of the main Chrome window will be hidden under the Sidewise window.

One possibility is to forcibly modify the F11'd Chrome tab's page content so that it has a "right margin" equal to the width of the Sidewise window. I'm not sure this would work well in all cases though, due to how web page layout works (e.g. CSS absolute positioning issues).

This should be fixed in today's release.

This should be fixed in today's release.

It is still being developed, but I haven't had a lot time for it recently.

I agree that open source is a good solution to this. My next major goal for the extension is to get the code cleaned up enough to make it open source. I am currently planning on doing this before adding any new major features.