The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE.
Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning).
It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing research would benefit from it.
Vivaldi can do tab tiling. Not nearly as customizable as an IDE as you describe, but you can vertically or horizontally tile multiple tabs on the same "page". Only browser I know that has that close of functionality
Early versions of Opera (maybe 20 years ago or so, I don't remember when exactly) had real MDI, where the tabs were subwindows rather than actual tabs. You could arrange them however you wanted, tile, cascade, etc.
For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.
I really, really liked a lot of Opera's ideas. I think someone on that team really understood good UI design principles, at least at the feature level. If memory serves it included an IRC client at least, and maybe even an FTP client? Can't remember about the latter, but definitely the former.
Perhaps a bit "bloated" for its time, but it was always pretty sleek to use. In fact I don't exactly remember why it never became mainstream. Maybe it had too many quirks or lagged behind others in terms of the new features, which... isn't entirely its own fault.
Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now. It looks like it has Whatsapp integration, among other things, which is the absolute last thing I'd ever want my browser to have an integration with.
it had irc client, rss feed reader, mail client all builtin. Its local caches were portable. Had shortcuts to hide images in current page, disable js (imagine early 2000s web ui with gifs everywhere) etc. Early opera truly was the best browser that ever.
And not an IDE like VSCode, but a fully customizable IDE.
It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway.
A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over feature for the vertical tabs doesn't work if the cursor is at the very left of the screen? And why can't we move the vertical bar to the right side of screen?
VS Code has always had vertical tabs. It actually launched without horizontal tabs support and only added it due to community pressure. The reason was that VS Code/Monaco was originally designed to run in the browser, and the VS Code team wanted to avoid having a "tabs within tabs" UI.
> For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar.
It was possible with extensions like titleless and monkey patch, but Microsoft did something recently that made these extensions not work on newer versions.
>It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years
What is a "basic feature" to you is apparently not that to most people, certainly not to me. Just how important could it be to resize the tab height? And what would vertical tabs do that the open editors panel doesn't? I also don't follow regarding the menu bar -- that's the way all apps behave on MacOS? You can put it into fullscreen mode if you want.
Do you actually need tabs though? First thing I do after installing VSCode is usually getting rid of the tabs and just use the file tree and "opening files" pane (recently got rid of that too because you can just invoke its popup with a hotkey).
What annoys me more is that stupid minimap that somehow has become an enabled by default "feature" on modern editors.
VS Code has a vertical documentlist, and if you want different styling, you can build an extension for this. No reason to have a duplicate feature out-of-the-box.
What are some examples? I finally got around to using a tiling window manager this week and have been loving it, but would love a browser without a status bar to go with it
I actually want a windowing system that provides the tree tab bar instead. I feel the paradigm of having windows around have been stuck for 40yrs and that the only major mainstream innovation is just manually tiling windows.
KDE has allowed grouping windows as tabs, but that never really took off. There's a vast amount of tiling WMs, but none of them are truly popular, and I also don't want to open a terminal, or worse, emacs, to deal with wifi/bluetooth/thumbdrives just to showoff how unnecessarily awkward some things get to be when you don't run some mainstream desktop.
I’ve been using pop os for the past few months and I’ve fallen in love with its snapping window manager.
I have a 4K screen plus the laptop (xps 13).
I can have two browsers open, then my ide. And then terminal on the laptop screen.
And I can easily slide the divider between the ide and browsers as necessary based on what requires the most space at the time.
Only issues I’ve run into is being able to move multiple stacked windows to a new location, all at once. I probably just haven’t found the right shortcut.
It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, as the browsers are independent, but I’d be keen to see new browsing options like that.
Sway (and i3?) actually has the notion of containers, which can contain multiple windows and can be selected and manipulated as a unit.
It works nicely. The only thing that I haven't automated yet is that I have a rather specific workspace layout on my 4k screen and converting it from/to a laptop-screen workspace when unplugged takes a few steps.
> The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE.
Yep. That is exactly how I think about it as well.
The browser and the IDE are effectively the same metaphor of a "super-app", just different security assumptions about where the information resides, how much it can be trusted and what can be done with it, how active the user input etc. In systems such as Firefox OS or ChromeOs the boundaries dissolve further.
Thinking about open source desktops and their application ecosystems, instead of countless independent efforts that waste precious talent in incompatible replication there could be some sort of architecture where lower level apps (editors, file/tab/bookmark/tag managers, shells, webview or spreadsheet renderers etc) could be recombined in various ways in the browser/IDE (or run as standalone apps).
Or, getting rid of tabs and going back to individual browser windows, but with some mechanism to visualise and navigate between them better on the desktop (e.g. window shrinks to 30% of full size on loss focus and stays to a side of the desk top until restored). I remember managing a fairly large number of Internet Explorer windows on Windows 98.
I thought about that too, the ability to group windows into tabs*, regardless of application is better managed by the desktop environment, rather than application.
UniPress Emacs for NeWS in 1988: Scriptable GUI, tabbed windows, pie menus, hypermedia authoring tool for HyperTIES browser.
Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets".
HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system
>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)
Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
How about taking another step back, and having a browser that functions as a scriptable user-customizable editable window manager like HyperCard?
Run the web browser directly on the hardware, and implement the desktop window manager with that, in a way that the whole system is a scriptable integrated development environment. Then it's easy to implement tabbed windows, pie menus, and user-editable HyperCard-like interfaces.
Here's a big step in the right direction of supporting pie menus on the desktop:
Simon Schneegans's "Kando" project aims to implement cross-platform pie menus on the desktop. Simon implemented the beautiful "Pie Fly" Gnome shell extension and WYSIWYG pie menu editor, so I am really looking forward to what he does with other desktop interfaces!
>Kando will be a pie menu for the desktop. It will be highly customizable and will allow you to create your own menus and actions. For instance, you can use it to control your music player, to open your favorite websites or to simulate shortcuts. It will be available for Windows, Linux and maybe macOS.
>Fly-Pie is an extension for GNOME Shell which lets you open marking menus via keyboard shortcuts. And — to the best of my knowledge — it is the first GNOME Shell extension with achievements!
>You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. It features a continuous learning curve which lets you gradually lift-off from a grumpie menu rookie to a snappie menu pielot. (You got it? Like pilot, but with a ). Once you opened a marking menu, you can seamlessly transition between three alternative selection modes:
>Point-and-Click: Select items by clicking on them or anywhere in the corresponding wedges.
>Marking-Mode: Select items by drawing gestures. To do this, click anywhere and drag your mouse. Pausing or making a turn selects the currently dragged item.
>Turbo-Mode: You can also "draw" gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift, or Alt without having to press your mouse button! This is especially useful when you opened the menu with a shortcut involving such a modifier.
Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!:
>At Sun we experimented with implementing an X11 window manager in NeWS. We didn't have transparency at the time (1992), but we did support shaped windows!
>The NeWS window manager supported cool stuff (for both X11 and NeWS windows!) like rooms, virtual scrolling desktops, tabbed windows, pie menus, was easily extensible and deeply customisable in PostScript, and ran locally in the window server so it could respond instantly to input events, lock the input queue and provide feedback and manipulate windows immediately without causing any context switches or dealing with asynchronous locking, unlocking and event handling. You'd never lose a keystroke or click when switching between applications, for example.
[...]
And here's how I think you should design a programmable "window manager" these days -- but it would be much more than just a window manager! It would be great for integrating legacy desktop and mobile applications into VR, for example!
>Don asks Peter Korn: Hey I would love to bounce an idea off of you! I didn't realize how much work you've done in accessibility.
>There is a window manager for the Mac called Slate, that is extensible in JavaScript -- it makes a hidden WebView and uses its JS interpreter by extending it with some interfaces to the app to do window management, using the Mac Accessibility API.
>So I wanted to make pie menus for it, and thought of a good approach: make the hidden WebView not so hidden, but in the topmost layer of windows, covering all the screens, with a transparent background, that shows the desktop through anywhere you don't draw html.
>Then just make pie menus with JavaScript, which I've done. Works like a charm!
>THEN the next step I would like to do is this:
>aQuery -- like jQuery, but for selecting, querying and manipulating Mac app user interfaces via the Accessibility framework and protocols.
>So you can write jQuery-like selectors that search for and select Accessibility objects, and then it provides a convenient high level API for doing all kinds of stuff with them. So you can write higher level plugin widgets with aQuery that use HTML with jQuery, or even other types of user interfaces like voice recognition/synthesis, video tracking, augmented reality, web services, etc!
>For example, I want to click on a window and it will dynamically configure jQuery Pie Menus with the commands in the menu of a live Mac app. Or make a hypercard-like user interface builder that lets people drag buttons or commands out of Mac apps into their own stacks, and make special purpose simplified guis for controlling and integrating Mac apps.
>Does that sound crazy? I think it just might work! Implement the aQuery "selector engine" and heavy lifting in Objective C so that it runs really fast, and presents a nice high level useful interface to JavaScript.
>Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot.
>That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented.
>Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar.
>VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR.
>The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open-ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces.
>For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces.
>Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen-scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX.
>Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods.
>Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...]
>Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source.
>Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface.
>Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility
>It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python:
>I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.
Vertical tabs without nesting (trees) is such a wasted opportunity. Nesting lets you close/minimise/etc a group of a related tabs, eg. all the search results you opened from a single query. I hope Brave's implementation at least lets you switch tabs using the mouse wheel, which is probably my favorite feature of the Firefox vertical tabs addons.
BTW, I was a TST user for many years, and recently switched to Sidebery, which seems to do the same and more, but is a bit more polished.
The only thing those Firefox extension lack is the ability to hide native tabs (I understand that this is a limitation of Firefox extension APIs). You have to manually modify your userChrome.css to do so.
I swear they said they were going to add hiding the top tab bar back in as a native option back in 2017, but I'm still using the userChrome.css hack today.
I used to think like this but now that I'm no longer a student with too much time on my hand, I find features that allow up to a hundred of tabs detrimental to my productivity. Simply vertical tabs strike the right balance.
Just installed and configured Sidebery and after a few minutes I already feel like it completely outclasses TST for Firefox. Thanks for the recommendation!
Sideberry is fantastic. Not only is it a great replacement for Tree Tabs, I've also found it to be a better alternative of Simple Tab Groups. With `userChrome` entries to auto-hide Sideberry and the native FF tabs, it's improved the web experience on my smallish laptop screen tremendously.
Agreed! Here's my current `userChrome.css` to hide the tab bar when Sidebery is open, IIRC adapted from their repo because theirs didn't work fully for me. Admittedly this is hacked together, it was mostly just trial and error, but it works!
To make it work only when Sidebery is open, make sure you add a preface value in the Sidebery settings and use the same value in the css above; in my case I just use an invisible character. Couple it with Ctrl-E keybind to toggle the Sidebery panel, and it's been a big quality of life improvement for me.
I think the preferences are a bit easier to understand, and I didn't have to install an add-on for an add-on to have mouse wheel support. I'm sure there's more, but it's been a few months and I don't quite remember.
TST remains great, though, very versatile and extensible.
Brave currently offers groups, which can be minimized to achieve some of the effect you mention. But like you, I'm hoping they bring true nesting in the future!
It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar. You can see in the video they posted that it saves almost no vertical space, while now taking up a massive amount of horizontal space.
> It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar.
Honestly, that's not the main selling point of vertical tabs for me. Horizontal tabs don't scale for more than a dozen or so, but vertical tabs do. The "wasted" horizontal space is useless for reading most page, but displays enough data for practical navigation, and the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).
> the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).
Firefox also lets you scroll the tabs horizontally. Which I prefer to Brave's approach of simply not displaying the last tabs in the bar if it's too many, which means newly opened tabs simply never show up while the others are shrunk so far they become difficult to hit with the cursor.
You can also remove that unnecessarily large sidebar header that Firefox insists on not letting users disable via normal means with userchrome mods. Some such setups can be seen at https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/.
"tab bar in titlebar" has been the Firefox default for a number of years at this point. If Linux, your distro/packager of choice may have overridden that. The only true exception to this is tile based WMs (which don't have title bars) but in that case it's still above by default.
It's not ridiculous at all if you have to compare two documents side-by-side which is something I do 10 times a day while coding whether its documentation+code or doing a git diff
FWIW, I'm using a single ultra wide screen and never have any full screen windows, always two side by side. Most Linux DEs and even Windows support this out of the box, for macOS there's spectacle.
That said, working on a web project right now, we _are_ ensuring it looks good when maximised on ultra wide monitors, because we figure people might actually do that. But I'm with you there, for most web content it's ridiculous.
I found that 21:9 works very well for me for work (gaming too, mind you). Sheets can show many rows, I can compare things side by side, I can maximize a console with ridiculously long lines, and I can dock the dev tools in the browser to the side. It's a like two 5:4s, side by side, without the bezels.
I have a 16:9 screen in portrait orientation, excellent for reading/writing etc. One small annoyance of 1080 as horizontal resolution is that it is just slightly too thin for some web layouts.
Sat next to it is a 32" 2560x1440 unit (they have near identical pixel pitch, so I don't have to worry about oddities like differential scaling between screens) that most of the time is split into two halves or ⅔+⅓ (under windows, the FancyZones util in PowerToys is handy for this).
I liked the arrangement so much at home that I've replicated it at my own expense in the office.
Yes, they don't follow their own principles to the logical conclusion
In Vivaldi it's much better - you can get rid of the header bar completely and only have the search/tool bar, styled to be narrower, saves real space
And since horizontal space is cheap in most websites, the latter part is less of an issue (though you still don't need it to be massive)
Arc is way ahead on browser UX. Opening links in Pinned Tabs into a modal over the Pinned Tab content is exactly how I want to use link aggregator sites
The trick is to hide all extra stuff like address bar, tabs, settings, OS related bars, etc. and alonly show the browser stuff upon Ctrl+L.
It's so much nicer, especially with an wm that's just gets out of the way - awesomewm
I struggle finding good page <titles> with the amount of space browsers give you. You should at least be able to see which tab is what if you have 3 for a website.
OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question.
I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development environment. Great browser, a lot of great UI ideas out of that shop.
OmniWeb was great! I think Opera still did it first, though.
I moved on to Safari after it died, but I missed vertical tabs dearly and still do. Hopefully this idea catches on well enough for the Safari team to finally steal it.
Yes, I remember Opera having it around that same time, and Firefox having a plugin to copy it. I think the Firefox plugin had full "tab tree" support though. I believe it died after one of the many updates that changed how plugins worked, although I haven't checked in a couple of decades to see if something similar has appeared.
I've been using Firefox with Tab Center Reborn, and a config which collapses the tabs so only the favicons are visible. Using Shift-Tab, Ctrl-Shift-Tab and Ctrl-T, Ctrl-W to go around and open/close is so logical for me. First time I heard about Tree style tabs I was so against them because they occupied significant amount of space and I didn't know you could collapse them. I don't see myself ever going back horizontal tabs. Vertical is so much better, especially on smaller screen (like 1366x768), where horizontal space isn't needed that much as vertical is.
Tree Style Tabs work well, because screen estate is not wasted on 16:9 and 16:10 style displays. Web browsing is mostly reading task and because of usability, line length cannot exceed a certain width. Thus, there is more screen estate horizontally around the page than vertically on top and bottom of the page you are reading.
I liked vertical tabs on my main monitor where there is plenty of space. But on the laptop, especially with using split screen i got too crowded. I have since made the tabs completely invisible and just navigate trough them with the Vimium extension.
This has some quirks because of the limitations a browser extension has, but I now much prefer to just use keyboard shortcuts and search to jump to tabs.
There is the issue of pages which are designed only for very wide screens and for mobile. In between screen sizes will cause the main content to be annoyingly skinny, if it isn't totally unreadable. These sites are relatively rare, thankfully.
The more enhancements I see browser vendors making to tabs, the more I think they’re reinventing bookmarks/favorites.
Safari introduced “tab groups” a while back, which to me is an insane mess of complexity. When I think about it though they’re just folders and each tab is a bookmark/favorite.
The vertical tabs in Brave remind me of bookmarks/favorites too.
For me, tab groups are nothing like bookmarks. Tab groups are a way of managing already open tabs in related group; showing and hiding groups as you need them. I use a similar tool in Firefox and I always have tabs related to about 4-5 projects open at once. I use the tab group tool to switch between the tabs by project so I only need to deal with 10-15 tabs at once.
These are tabs that I don’t want to close as they have context and sometimes ongoing edits. It’s a bit like having multiple windows each with tabs but this keeps it together in one window and makes it easier to manager.
Without this, I would be facing 50-75 tabs and trying to figure out which ones were related to the project I needed to work on at the current time.
I don’t follow. Tabs are nothing like favorites. You go to a favorite and open links within it in new tabs. Eventually the tabs will be closed and you’ll often never visit those links ever again, as opposed to a favorite.
As for tab groups, I could never get used to them, but I do use vertical tabs and find them quite useful.
I have so many bookmarks which I have never revisited ever.
What counts isn't some abstract storage concept but the UI and UX to manage them. Bookmarks are this drawer in your basement where you have to actively spend energy to find them. Tree tabs are self organizing. How they are are stored is irrelevant to me.
Arc has "pinned tabs", but not "bookmarks". While they can be used similarly, I find it quite annoying to use the search to pull something out of my "bookmarks", only to have it open a directory hierarchy eight levels deep when I switch to it.
Likewise, if I navigate away from the page on the pinned tab, I lose my "bookmark".
The reason I like it is that he’s unified tabs and bookmarks almost, it’s a great UX that looks like some things you might have seen but still feels different.
He’s also got wicked design sense — but I’m biased so. I also feel like I’m doing him a disservice — he’s got one of those silly lifetime deals going right now.
I'm curious but somewhat discouraged by the lack of a single screenshot. I don't want to install a minimalist browser that won't have extension capability and a lot of other features just to see if I like one thing that it does.
Gonna be honest, that website is doing a big disservice for the product. No screenshots and the navigation disappears when I click a link so I have to hit the browser back button to go to the next page.
No screenshots is huge though. That should be front an center for something that is all about the UI experience. Why would I commit $100 dollars to something I can't see.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not. Your comment is completely earnest, but the website seems to be a send up of websites that don't tell you anything about the product.
Would you mind providing just a little more information? This is clearly an issue but I'm not sure what it could be -- I'm not sure sentry is installed on the site either.
What page were you on where you saw that? Were you not able to load the page itself?
If you wouldn't mind opening up the browser console, I'd love to know what went wrong.
I thought this was dumb until I opened his Twitter and read through it for a bit and saw what his vision for it was and how he's creating it. Now I'm interested.
Needs extension support before it's really viable though.
Readit News
Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning).
It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing research would benefit from it.
https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/
For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.
Perhaps a bit "bloated" for its time, but it was always pretty sleek to use. In fact I don't exactly remember why it never became mainstream. Maybe it had too many quirks or lagged behind others in terms of the new features, which... isn't entirely its own fault.
Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now. It looks like it has Whatsapp integration, among other things, which is the absolute last thing I'd ever want my browser to have an integration with.
It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway.
A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over feature for the vertical tabs doesn't work if the cursor is at the very left of the screen? And why can't we move the vertical bar to the right side of screen?
It was possible with extensions like titleless and monkey patch, but Microsoft did something recently that made these extensions not work on newer versions.
What is a "basic feature" to you is apparently not that to most people, certainly not to me. Just how important could it be to resize the tab height? And what would vertical tabs do that the open editors panel doesn't? I also don't follow regarding the menu bar -- that's the way all apps behave on MacOS? You can put it into fullscreen mode if you want.
What annoys me more is that stupid minimap that somehow has become an enabled by default "feature" on modern editors.
VS Code has a vertical documentlist, and if you want different styling, you can build an extension for this. No reason to have a duplicate feature out-of-the-box.
KDE has allowed grouping windows as tabs, but that never really took off. There's a vast amount of tiling WMs, but none of them are truly popular, and I also don't want to open a terminal, or worse, emacs, to deal with wifi/bluetooth/thumbdrives just to showoff how unnecessarily awkward some things get to be when you don't run some mainstream desktop.
I’ve been using pop os for the past few months and I’ve fallen in love with its snapping window manager.
I have a 4K screen plus the laptop (xps 13).
I can have two browsers open, then my ide. And then terminal on the laptop screen.
And I can easily slide the divider between the ide and browsers as necessary based on what requires the most space at the time.
Only issues I’ve run into is being able to move multiple stacked windows to a new location, all at once. I probably just haven’t found the right shortcut.
It’s not exactly what you’re talking about, as the browsers are independent, but I’d be keen to see new browsing options like that.
It works nicely. The only thing that I haven't automated yet is that I have a rather specific workspace layout on my 4k screen and converting it from/to a laptop-screen workspace when unplugged takes a few steps.
Yep. That is exactly how I think about it as well.
The browser and the IDE are effectively the same metaphor of a "super-app", just different security assumptions about where the information resides, how much it can be trusted and what can be done with it, how active the user input etc. In systems such as Firefox OS or ChromeOs the boundaries dissolve further.
Thinking about open source desktops and their application ecosystems, instead of countless independent efforts that waste precious talent in incompatible replication there could be some sort of architecture where lower level apps (editors, file/tab/bookmark/tag managers, shells, webview or spreadsheet renderers etc) could be recombined in various ways in the browser/IDE (or run as standalone apps).
like you can have multiple windows side by side, so what's the benefit of panes?
[*] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...
Emacs served as an IDE with tabbed window and pie menus, for interactively editing, viewing, and navigating HyperTIES markup language documents, graphics, and interactive PostScript "applets".
HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...
>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)
Emacs provides the pie menus you see popped up in the illustration (Articulate, Edit, New (Storyboard, Link, Picture, Target), Define) that control the HyperTIES browser from the custom text editing mode of HyperTIES storyboards (like web pages), which the HyperTIES browser (in the background, which emacs controls in a sub-process) formats and displays. HyperTIES also uses pie menus for navigation and in interactive "applets" programmed in PostScript.
Run the web browser directly on the hardware, and implement the desktop window manager with that, in a way that the whole system is a scriptable integrated development environment. Then it's easy to implement tabbed windows, pie menus, and user-editable HyperCard-like interfaces.
Here's a big step in the right direction of supporting pie menus on the desktop:
Simon Schneegans's "Kando" project aims to implement cross-platform pie menus on the desktop. Simon implemented the beautiful "Pie Fly" Gnome shell extension and WYSIWYG pie menu editor, so I am really looking forward to what he does with other desktop interfaces!
Introducing: Kando:
https://ko-fi.com/post/Introducing-Ken-Do-L3L7L0FQ2
https://github.com/kando-menu/kando
>Kando will be a pie menu for the desktop. It will be highly customizable and will allow you to create your own menus and actions. For instance, you can use it to control your music player, to open your favorite websites or to simulate shortcuts. It will be available for Windows, Linux and maybe macOS.
Fly-Pie:
https://github.com/Schneegans/Fly-Pie
>Fly-Pie is an extension for GNOME Shell which lets you open marking menus via keyboard shortcuts. And — to the best of my knowledge — it is the first GNOME Shell extension with achievements!
>You can use it to launch applications, simulate hotkeys, open URLs and much more. It features a continuous learning curve which lets you gradually lift-off from a grumpie menu rookie to a snappie menu pielot. (You got it? Like pilot, but with a ). Once you opened a marking menu, you can seamlessly transition between three alternative selection modes:
>Point-and-Click: Select items by clicking on them or anywhere in the corresponding wedges.
>Marking-Mode: Select items by drawing gestures. To do this, click anywhere and drag your mouse. Pausing or making a turn selects the currently dragged item.
>Turbo-Mode: You can also "draw" gestures while holding Ctrl, Shift, or Alt without having to press your mouse button! This is especially useful when you opened the menu with a shortcut involving such a modifier.
Fly-Pie 7: GNOME Shell 40+ and a new WYSIWYG Menu Editor!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRT3O9-H5Xs
Fly-Pie 10: A new Clipboard Menu, proper touch support & much more!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGXtckqhEIk
I've written about reinventing scriptable HyperCard-like window managers with pie menus and tabbed windows before:
SimCity, Cellular Automata, and Happy Tool for HyperLook (nee HyperNeWS (nee GoodNeWS)):
https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperlook-nee-hypernews-nee-go...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13817649
>At Sun we experimented with implementing an X11 window manager in NeWS. We didn't have transparency at the time (1992), but we did support shaped windows!
>The NeWS window manager supported cool stuff (for both X11 and NeWS windows!) like rooms, virtual scrolling desktops, tabbed windows, pie menus, was easily extensible and deeply customisable in PostScript, and ran locally in the window server so it could respond instantly to input events, lock the input queue and provide feedback and manipulate windows immediately without causing any context switches or dealing with asynchronous locking, unlocking and event handling. You'd never lose a keystroke or click when switching between applications, for example.
[...]
And here's how I think you should design a programmable "window manager" these days -- but it would be much more than just a window manager! It would be great for integrating legacy desktop and mobile applications into VR, for example!
>aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility
http://donhopkins.com/mediawiki/index.php/AQuery
>Don asks Peter Korn: Hey I would love to bounce an idea off of you! I didn't realize how much work you've done in accessibility.
>There is a window manager for the Mac called Slate, that is extensible in JavaScript -- it makes a hidden WebView and uses its JS interpreter by extending it with some interfaces to the app to do window management, using the Mac Accessibility API.
>So I wanted to make pie menus for it, and thought of a good approach: make the hidden WebView not so hidden, but in the topmost layer of windows, covering all the screens, with a transparent background, that shows the desktop through anywhere you don't draw html.
>Then just make pie menus with JavaScript, which I've done. Works like a charm!
>THEN the next step I would like to do is this:
>aQuery -- like jQuery, but for selecting, querying and manipulating Mac app user interfaces via the Accessibility framework and protocols.
>So you can write jQuery-like selectors that search for and select Accessibility objects, and then it provides a convenient high level API for doing all kinds of stuff with them. So you can write higher level plugin widgets with aQuery that use HTML with jQuery, or even other types of user interfaces like voice recognition/synthesis, video tracking, augmented reality, web services, etc!
>For example, I want to click on a window and it will dynamically configure jQuery Pie Menus with the commands in the menu of a live Mac app. Or make a hypercard-like user interface builder that lets people drag buttons or commands out of Mac apps into their own stacks, and make special purpose simplified guis for controlling and integrating Mac apps.
>Does that sound crazy? I think it just might work! Implement the aQuery "selector engine" and heavy lifting in Objective C so that it runs really fast, and presents a nice high level useful interface to JavaScript.
[...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29105919
>>Would you mind to share your opinion on Wayland with us?
>Thanks for asking! Hold my bong. ;) [lots of opinions omitted, see link above...]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22829690
>>Simula: A VR window manager for Linux [...]
>Soon after the invention of the movie camera, there was a "genera" of films that consisted of nothing but pointing a movie camera at a stage, and filming a play in one shot.
>That's the classic example of using a new technology to emulate an old technology, without taking advantage of the unique advantages of the new technology, before the grammar and language of film had been invented.
>Simply projecting desktop user interfaces designed for flat 2D screens and mice into VR is still in the "novelty show" age, like filming staged plays written for a theater, without any editing, shots, or film grammar.
>VR window managers are just a stop-gap backwards-compatibility bridge, while people work on inventing a grammar and language of interactive VR and AR user interfaces, and re-implement all the desktop and mobile applications from the ground up so they're not merely usable but actually enjoyable and aesthetically pleasing to use in VR.
>The current definition of "window manager," especially as it applies to X-Windows desktops, tightly constrains how we think and what we expect of user interface and application design. We need something much more flexible and extensible. Unfortunately X-Windows decades ago rejected the crucially important ideas behind NeWS and AJAX, that the window manager should be open-ended and dynamically extensible with downloadable code, which is the key to making efficient, deeply integrated user interfaces.
>For example, the "Dragon Naturally Speaking" speech synthesis and recognition system has "dragonfly", a Python-based "speech manager" that is capable of hooking into existing unmodified desktop applications, and scripting custom speech based user interfaces.
>Another more ambitious example is Morgan Dixon's work on Prefab, that screen-scrapes the pixels of desktop apps, and uses pattern recognition and composition to remix and modify them. This is like cinematographers finally discovering they can edit films, cut and splice shots together, overlay text and graphics and pictures-in-pictures and adjacent frames. But Prefab isn't built around a scripting language like dragonfly, NeWS or AJAX.
>Here's some stuff I've written about the direction that user interfaces should take to move beyond the antique notion of "window managers", and enables much deeper integration and accessibility and alternative input and output methods.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14182061
>Glad to see people are still making better window managers! [...] I think extensibility and accessibility are extremely important for window managers. [...] I'd like to take that idea a lot further, so I wrote up some ideas about programming window management, accessibility, screen scraping, pattern recognition and automation in JavaScript. [...] Check out Morgan Dixon's and James Fogarty's amazing work on user interface customization with Prefab, about which they've published several excellent CHI papers: [...]
>Imagine if every interface was open source. Any of us could modify the software we use every day. Unfortunately, we don't have the source.
>Prefab realizes this vision using only the pixels of everyday interfaces. This video shows the use of Prefab to add new functionality to Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. Prefab represents a new approach to deploying HCI research in everyday software, and is also the first step toward a future where anybody can modify any interface.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18797818
>Here are some other interesting things related to scriptable window management and accessibility to check out: aQuery -- Like jQuery for Accessibility
https://web.archive.org/web/20180826132551/http://donhopkins...
>It would also be great to flesh out the accessibility and speech recognition APIs, and make it possible to write all kinds of intelligent application automation and integration scripts, bots, with nice HTML user interfaces in JavaScript. Take a look at what Dragon Naturally Speaking has done with Python:
https://github.com/t4ngo/dragonfly
>Morgan Dixon's work with Prefab is brilliant.
>I would like to discuss how we could integrate Prefab with a Javascriptable, extensible API like aQuery, so you could write "selectors" that used prefab's pattern recognition techniques, bind those to JavaScript event handlers, and write high level widgets on top of that in JavaScript, and implement the graphical overlays and gui enhancements in HTML/Canvas/etc like I've done with Slate and the WebView overlay.
BTW, I was a TST user for many years, and recently switched to Sidebery, which seems to do the same and more, but is a bit more polished.
Doesn't really match my experience. In which ways is it more polished?
TST remains great, though, very versatile and extensible.
Honestly, that's not the main selling point of vertical tabs for me. Horizontal tabs don't scale for more than a dozen or so, but vertical tabs do. The "wasted" horizontal space is useless for reading most page, but displays enough data for practical navigation, and the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).
Firefox also lets you scroll the tabs horizontally. Which I prefer to Brave's approach of simply not displaying the last tabs in the bar if it's too many, which means newly opened tabs simply never show up while the others are shrunk so far they become difficult to hit with the cursor.
In the default setting, there is OS title bar, then a address+icon bar, then the tab bar.
After installing sidebar tabs, you can remove the tab bar with some css, which saves about 5% of the vertical screen space.
That's on the right track, but going too far. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more reasonable.
The idea of using 16:9 screens for work needs to die in a fire.
That said, working on a web project right now, we _are_ ensuring it looks good when maximised on ultra wide monitors, because we figure people might actually do that. But I'm with you there, for most web content it's ridiculous.
Sat next to it is a 32" 2560x1440 unit (they have near identical pixel pitch, so I don't have to worry about oddities like differential scaling between screens) that most of the time is split into two halves or ⅔+⅓ (under windows, the FancyZones util in PowerToys is handy for this).
I liked the arrangement so much at home that I've replicated it at my own expense in the office.
And since horizontal space is cheap in most websites, the latter part is less of an issue (though you still don't need it to be massive)
I can use 2 windows side by side and the pane just eats horizontal padding on most sites because narrow columns are prettier and easier to read.
I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development environment. Great browser, a lot of great UI ideas out of that shop.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more
I only tried it on a few websites but it worked remarkably well.
I paid for that browser and I still would.
I moved on to Safari after it died, but I missed vertical tabs dearly and still do. Hopefully this idea catches on well enough for the Safari team to finally steal it.
Deleted Comment
My setup: https://i.imgur.com/sZ8zdol.png
This has some quirks because of the limitations a browser extension has, but I now much prefer to just use keyboard shortcuts and search to jump to tabs.
Safari introduced “tab groups” a while back, which to me is an insane mess of complexity. When I think about it though they’re just folders and each tab is a bookmark/favorite.
The vertical tabs in Brave remind me of bookmarks/favorites too.
These are tabs that I don’t want to close as they have context and sometimes ongoing edits. It’s a bit like having multiple windows each with tabs but this keeps it together in one window and makes it easier to manager.
Without this, I would be facing 50-75 tabs and trying to figure out which ones were related to the project I needed to work on at the current time.
As for tab groups, I could never get used to them, but I do use vertical tabs and find them quite useful.
What counts isn't some abstract storage concept but the UI and UX to manage them. Bookmarks are this drawer in your basement where you have to actively spend energy to find them. Tree tabs are self organizing. How they are are stored is irrelevant to me.
Arc has "pinned tabs", but not "bookmarks". While they can be used similarly, I find it quite annoying to use the search to pull something out of my "bookmarks", only to have it open a directory hierarchy eight levels deep when I switch to it.
Likewise, if I navigate away from the page on the pinned tab, I lose my "bookmark".
https://browser.horse/
The reason I like it is that he’s unified tabs and bookmarks almost, it’s a great UX that looks like some things you might have seen but still feels different.
He’s also got wicked design sense — but I’m biased so. I also feel like I’m doing him a disservice — he’s got one of those silly lifetime deals going right now.
https://twitter.com/PascalPixel/status/1585224743480721408
I've passed it on, hopefully he'll have the website updated with a screenshot in like... 10 mins
No screenshots is huge though. That should be front an center for something that is all about the UI experience. Why would I commit $100 dollars to something I can't see.
https://twitter.com/PascalPixel/status/1585224743480721408
I'm talking to pascal right now and urging him to put a screenshot up!
Here's a screenshot of the browser: https://twitter.com/PascalPixel/status/1585224743480721408
What page were you on where you saw that? Were you not able to load the page itself?
If you wouldn't mind opening up the browser console, I'd love to know what went wrong.
Needs extension support before it's really viable though.