Never saw the appeal in vertical tabs, but maybe Edge or FF extensions just don’t do them well enough… Good for Mozilla though, I guess
For 16:9 (ish) displays you have more pixels left to right than up and down, it makes sense to use up your horizontal space first when placing permanent UI elements on your screen. Still up to preference though.
Agree… Too much screen real estate horizontally, not enough vertically
Especially with the gigantic tab buttons the browser uses by default even in “compact” mode.
A lot of websites are optimized for reading at around 1024 pixel which means many sites just give you the void to look at on both sides of a centered site (worse in naïvely scaling up all UI to the max so widscreen monitors get billboard-sized text)—so you may as well have more vertical reading space. The other part has to deal with keeping the titles readable with several open as the Latin script is horizontal. Either the titles disappear & you are left with tolerate logo favicons like Chromium or like Fx where the tabs move to vertical scrolling which is difficult to parse quickly—there’s a reason why you write your grocery list with a newline as a separator than trying to cram it all on a single line. Given the current Fx implementations using the sidebar are kind of a hack, I for one am happy to see this finally being worked on.
Bad news is that it is not clear at this point whether Mozilla is going to go forward with the implementation. A post on Reddit by one of the project members suggests that the build is a “rough proof-of-concept”. Some features tested in the build “did not survive”. It is unclear which did not, as they are not mentioned. Mozilla is, however, implementing those that survived the cut into Firefox. Again, the poster does not mention which those are. It is also not verified that the poster is actually a member of the project team, so take this with a grain of salt as well.
My dream would for this to at least have an option for collapsable tree-style tabs. That’s what I’m missing the most from the Edge implementation. Even “normal” vertical tabs struggle when you have over a hundred open tabs.
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Ff with sidebery is pretty amazing. Although, it’s annoying you need to add a CSS file to disable regular tabs.
I have a CSS file anyways to make look the giant buttons like actual tabs.
congratulats to the people liking them i guess. i personally dont get it, since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though
The counterpoint is since 16:9 became the de facto standard for monitors, vertical resolution is at much more of a premium than horizontal resolution is.
i get where youre coming from, but imho the eye tends to parse information more effectively if delivered vertically, since it knows it that way from other media. just my personal opinion though.
Try out Tree Style Tabs for an hour. I’m curious how you’ll feel about it.
I’ve been using TST for years and while it can be a bit buggy at times I couldn’t imagine going back to the default tab system.
I think you’re missing what’s going on. The text is still written left-to-right. You don’t need to read the tabs vertically. The tabs are stacked on top of each other in the sidebar instead of lined up along the top of the window.
I completely hid my tabs with custom css and I’ll never go back. With something like vimium-c you can switch tabs with vim-like bindings and an fzf-like menu. If you have lots of tabs, the fzf way is way faster to pick out a specific tab than it is to look for it in a tab row (or column). If you have few tabs, you don’t even need to see them to know where they are. I’m being very serious. Tabs are bloat. I recommend trying it out if it is something for you.
(edit) On top of that, it looks so clean. You get a bit more space for the actual content (I also hide my url bar, it pops up when you use it). It fits right in with a keyboard focus workflow, you get consistent keybindings across vim and your browser (I use the same keybinds for switching buffers in vim so it feels the same).
Crazy that you are getting hate for this perfectly reasonable and well-expressed opinion. No counter-arguments, just “muh i no like muh go away”.
Apparently this place is not so different from the R-site at all.
I would love the option of keeping containers in vertical tabs with “page tabs” horizontal. For example; Facebook, Personal, Banking, Work, Incognito, etc containers along the left as vertical tabs, and each one has all the pages in tabs across the top. Vertical tabs only appear after you open more than one type of container.
Workspaces. Vivaldi has this and it’s the only reason I use them.
Is each Workspace isolated like Firefox’s container tabs?
Not sure what that means. But you have workspaces that contain various tabs and you can’t access a workspace’s tabs from another workspace. I have workspaces for recipes, videos, programming, and gaming.
Firefox Containers are walled off from each other. No settings, cookies, trackers, etc. are shared between one container group and another.
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Wake me up when we have Chrome-style tab groups in FF.
No, I mean Chrome-style tab groups. Existing FF add-ons are okay, but nowhere near as nice as in Chrome.
I don’t get their allure. Why not Tree Style Tabs? You can create “groups” and endless subgroups. Also, no need to scroll horizontally, which takes way longer to find stuff, just scroll vertically or collapse trees.
Tab groups seem inferior to tree style tabs.
As usual, Mozilla doesn’t come up with new things. Only when Floorp and Waterfox start doing stuff do they think “Oh wait, people actually like that? Well, let’s kill an extension or fork!”.
Tree Style Tabs have existed for years. I guess it took them a while to wake up.
Christ. If they don’t do vertical tabs people act like it’s the end of the world and Firefox is a piece of shit browser that deserves to die, and when they do they aren’t being original enough!
They can’t win. What do you actually want? Diagonal tabs??
If you want vertical tabs with the ability to organize them in trees I suggest the Sideberry extension. It legitimately makes me nervous that the functionality would ever go away, it improves my productivity so much.
You can bookmark trees, collapse them, search them, load/unload them manually, I could go on. It makes it easy to organize dozens or hundreds of tabs. I have some trees for emails, news, forums, projects, etc. When I’m done just fold it up: the top tab bar can hide tabs that aren’t in the active tree you’re using, so you can still navigate the tabs normally.
Sideberry is pathetically ugly. They couldn’t even be arsed to use the same font as the rest of the UX. The hierarchy is poorly shown too.
The masterclass in side tabs and tab grouping is with Vivaldi, and, sad to say it but Safari too.
When you combine Vivaldi with the TabRetitle extension, it is unbeatable.
Have you used it recently? Previous versions I would’ve agreed, but 5.0 was a huge improvement. If I didn’t know, I’d likely have assumed it to be a native feature.
I’ll take a look at Vivaldi’s approach though, I’ve heard good things about those features previously.
I was just today trying FF again and discovered vertical tabs was via extension only and holy shit disabling the tabs up top looked like a bit of work. Native vertical tabs and grouping and I’m back. It should just copy the layout that Edge does.
I migrated from Edge for the last time to avoid Manifest v4, I’ve been missing vertical tabs a lot. Sidebery just didn’t work for me. I really like how this is looking.
Yesss come on! I moved to Edge at my place of work because I can no longer see what I’m doing with horizontal tabs. And we can’t use addons in Firefox.
This will land in ESR in three years time and then we’ll be rolling…
Why does everyone like vertical tabs? Today my tab icons are so small because I have so many. Monitors are wider than they are taller. What am I missing?
They are awesome. To me at least, but only if you save space by hiding the regular tab bar and it is easier to manage tabs since they are now closer together. Also, if you make the right --or left, it is up to you, I pick right-- sidebar auto hide and letting just the icons show. You do gain a lot of extra space. Mind you, you need to enable CSS via About:Config. On too of, before, using say, Sideberry. I like you thought I did not like it but now that I have tried it. I simply will not go back. I have a userChrome.css file that place on all my machines on a fresh install, now.
Monitors are wider than they are taller.
Personally, exactly for this reason.
