I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in terms of focus.
Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).
I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful" browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless" session, with the understanding that I can close any of these tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing anything important. If I do come across something important, it gets noted down elsewhere.
I actively use tree style tabs, and have dozens to hundreds. With auto tab discard, it's not taxing.
This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured, but are much more high-ceremony to create.
To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so that you can track, from which page did you open this link, what links did you open on this page, etc.
I can see the appeal of this, and more broadly, not having to think about tab management. But for me, I find I actively benefit from the process of deciding what to keep around.
> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
Have you tried Arc? It's essentially completely designed around the concept you describe. I believe someone is actively working on an "ArcFox" clone of its behavior for Firefox, but I'm not sure what the current state of the project is.
> To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one.
Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two. For example: I have groups of bookmarks that I like to open as tabs in a separate window. If I only need them once a week, I want to close the window when I am done and pull them up again when they are needed. Fishing them out of a history of all of my browsing is something that I don't want to endure (even if they are stored in the history as a group).
Other people have other needs. Some only want an extremely limited number of tabs open at one time (presumably to help them focus).
I do this too; have you found effective ways to tell firefox to maybe chill on eating all memory? I find if I don't restart ~1/week, it will end up reserving ~32GB of RAM for itself, which is just absurd.
I'm using TST too, but instead of grouping relevant projects into one branch, I'm using the Simple Tab Groups extension to switch between long-term projects. It simply replaces one set of tabs with another. I have a few groups related to work and several groups related to personal stuff (homelab, Hackintosh, Clojure, finance, etc.). I don't access some of these groups for months, but once I have a bit of free time, they are just two clicks away.
Why not use actual bookmarks at that point? They also are able to be nested into a tree structure via folders. I never had tabs open after a session but I keep bookmarks (it turns out I never actually look at the bookmarks, but let's not talk about that).
Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.
I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.
Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.
Vivaldi has this built-in, they call it Workspaces. It's the #1 thing I like about the browser.
Firefox had this to back in ancient times, it was called Tab Candy, Panorama, or tab groups, depending on the release number. Then they killed it because "nobody used it."
I use this and love it. One of the most useful adons. Really helps me to differentiate work mode form non work mode. I do wish it was built in because it appears to do it a hacky way by using bookmarks. Which is fine, because you can think of these tabs like temporary bookmarks.
Usually how I do it is at my office desk I have a second monitor I hook my laptop up to. So I open a new window, let that be the group, and then I use my mac for the terminal and my ipad sits to the side with spotify and any chat apps, out of the way and easy to dismiss.
What's extra satisfying is I'm a tab hoarder. But you finish a project and get to see all those tabs go away.
Unfortunately it doesn't work for pinned tabs - I use them for pages that I want to keep for longer and remember about them. Bookmarks are used for something that I store and go back to it seldom (e.g. when I store a recipe).
I put together a simple TST hack / extension that puts recently active tabs in the horizontal space (with a "user-defined" timeout). Have been using it actively for the last few years.
It's nowhere near perfect (see comments in the gist), but I genuinely enjoy the paradigm of easy access active tabs alongside a full laundry list. I find myself reinstalling it on new machines as I go. It's also just a few lines of CSS.
That said, keen to try out the nightly version of vertical tabs. Tho I'm hoping my active tabs hack might work with it too.
That's the next feature on my list of things to use in sidebary!
$Work is actively merging teams from different companies so I'm going to be juggling having to use different accounts on some SaaS platforms until we've gotten everything combined.
Sidebary has so many very useful and powerful features but I'm trying to be disciplined and mixing them in with my typical workflow 1 at a time and actually using it for a while before moving on to the next. (Ok, I might have gone full ham when I first installed it but it was so different from my normal flow that I quickly realized it was counter productive).
I switched to Sidebery from TreeStyleTabs and I much prefer it. Tab groups are great as I can separate different styles of browsing such as news browsing or work etc.
You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_). But that many tabs can only happen with a vertical tab-bar. I started with tree-style tabs but I'm now using "Sideberry" which seems to be a little nicer.
> You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_).
People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12 tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close attention to organization and establishing routines to cut down on distractions and reduce the possibility of variation in daily activities are very common coping strategies.
Hey fellow tab hoarder! I "only" have 744 tabs open right now (in Edge). Though chrome, firefox, brave, arc, and supermium have a few hundred each... (they've been force closed by task manager so my laptop still technically runs haha).
It's funny finding fellow tab hoarders online, people rarely hit the thousands - you're pretty much the first person I've encountered who's got more tabs open than me.
Btw what's your PC specs? I'm using a Framework 13 (7840u, 32gb ram) and am currently at 56% RAM usage. I find a fairly big difference when I'm connected to power and when I'm not, for some reason.
I've got ADHD and work hard to keep my tabs under control. As soon as they get too small to read (at least part of) the title, I lose the ability to keep track of what I've got open, so there's no value in keeping them open. That threshold is about 20 tabs per window, and at most about 4 windows, and ideally closer to 5 tabs each in 2 windows, when things are under control.
I used to be like that until I installed a plugin that autocloses all non-pinned tabs. Now I couldn't even imagine having so many. Why don't you just close the window? Is there something in there that you can somehow more easily obtain than just searching the history?
Fellow tab hoarder here (though I pale in comparison to your 2630). I had the exact same experience starting with tree style tabs and switching to sideberry. Very comparable, but I agree that Sideberry feels a bit nicer, and it has wicked customizability settings.
> I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
I followed the same trajectory. I now keep one window for more stable things that will be left open for a while (calendar, email, some long-lived task) and another for stuff I'm actively working on (the app I'm developing, docs for some API, etc). If I go over more than two windows with ~6 tabs each I just start closing things because I've almost certainly gone past the point of needing some of those tabs and if I need to get back to them it's usually faster to just retrace the steps I took to get to them in the first place or search in my history.
It really depends on your workflows. I dread tree style on work laptop as I go through tickets a lot, and only what matters to me is last 4 digits out of 10 the tickets have. If I use horizontal tabs second half of tab name is truncated but opposite on tree styled ones
Nobody will probably read this anymore but I had the same problem and used the same solution - starting my browsers as
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customera (nice dark theme, custom list of extensions and corporate bookmarks)
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customerb (yeallow-blue theme to stand out)
and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy
That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev
anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)
I recommend Tree Tabs over Tree Style Tabs as it let's you make tab groups. I will basically have one group per ticket or project, coloring the group depending on the state of that ticket (eventually going green when I've completed it but want to keep it around for a short while in case questions arise). Once the ticket has been done for a sprint I'll close the entire tab group.
I feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate.
These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.
In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
The ancestry information in Tree Style Tabs (and also with Orion's built-in vertical tabs) is an undersold feature, I think. Edge has vertical tabs and they're not terribly useful. You get a constant-sized click target, which is a huge UX bump over Chrome's shrinking targets, but having trees of tabs is amazingly useful for organization.
I hadn't really thought about the side-by-side window thing, though, so I'll keep that in mind when debating vertical tabs. I usually run with a multi-monitor and while I do side-by-side with i3, that's on a large monitor so screen real estate isn't a problem.
> In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
Firefox has multiple ways you can do the tab search.
- Firefox View is an icon originally configured at the front of the tab bar that takes you to a dedicated page listing your tabs, recently visited, and lets you search tabs and otherwise manage them.
- Firefox has a tab search built into the address bar as soon as you enter the character '%' followed by a space. So for two sets of two keystrokes you're doing tab search: `Ctrl<L> + '% '`.
IMO the latter especially is fast and easy enough that I don't miss Chrome's tab search, and I often go into Firefox View just to see what I've got open and trim it down.
I use Edge currently because of the vertical tabs and I switch between the two modes to suit my needs. 90% of the time, I only use horizontal tabs. For the other 10%, it suits my needs when doing research, keeping all my tabs available and so on.
Yeah, I gave an honest shot at using vertical tabs for a few months because it frankly does seem like a more logical use of screen real estate. Web pages don't tend to take up much horizontal space, so you might as well put a bigger list of tabs there where they can all show more text.
For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and right. And all my other apps with tabs still use horizontal tabs, so I couldn't fully switch over to that model in my head. Additionally the URL is still at the top so it was more work to glance back and forth between the left of my browser for the tab and the URL at the top which in my mind are more "closely linked" for that to make sense.
But you also highlighted a good point, the limited space of traditional tabs does keep my organization in check. Once I get around the 20-tab mark and I'm unable to see any text beyond the website's favicon, I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to clean up.
I think vertical tabs has the exact same effect of being artificially space limiting if that's valuable to you, without the amount of visible text changing every single time you open or close a tab.
I tend to sit with 20-40 tabs open, which is in the vicinity of how many a vertical tab list can accommodate comfortably, but I get about 4 letters per tab. If I needed to be able to see the text, I'd have to cap a window out at maybe 8 tabs, which is just unreasonable for some workflows.
This is a failure of the browser setup if you have to resort to a text file for tabs
Also don't get the benefit of the stateless session as a private window - you can just as well close a regular second browser window and not look back at history?
I don't use a text file for tabs, I use a text file for taking notes.
The fact that the second window is private isn't hugely relevant, it just helps to stop me from accidentally doing stateful things in it (and reduces cross-site tracking in the process). The point is that I never have to ask "is this tab important?", the decision was already made up-front, based on where I opened the tab in the first place.
Found a recent screenshot of it on Reddit. Looks good, I hope it has similar nesting like Tree Style Tab though. In my opinion that is still the best implementation of this idea across all browsers.
Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either – but it does have groups and profiles. They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more, so I'm glad they finally found some time to do this.
> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more
I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
I mostly agree, and don't get all the fuss about Chrome (or any other browser's) UI. To me they look all very similar and function very similarly. The differences just don't seem that big of a deal. I think it is mostly people being resistant to change. I had one friend that I convinced to switch to FireFox after a year[0]. A month after he switched over I got him to admit that it was easy to switch and there's no real change.
> it took a week of tinkering
I wish this was more obvious, but there is a user.js file that Firefox looks at[1,2,3]. You can edit this and carry it around in a dotfiles or something.
> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more
I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
[0] Argument is about having legitimate browser competition and the privacy boost of containerizing what data Google could (keyword) collect. I'd really only bring it up when he'd be complaining about Chrome or Google, so quite often.
On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better.
But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
It's a catch-22 because if you stop innovating your UI for 20 years and alternatives come up with something people actually like then you will lose users to them and slowly fade into irrelevancy.
Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.
I think the best vertical tabs implementation in firefox is Sidebery. The use of "panes" to group tabs is brilliant. Older versions were buggy, but version 5 has been rock solid for me.
Can't agree more, have been using sidebery for about a month now, and even completely dropped chromium which I ran beside firefox for the last years to only running firefox with sideberry and container-tabs now.
How have I not heard about this in the bajillion times I whined about tab groups?
I kinda dislike that Firefox only have one good option that involves completely hiding each group currently not in use, but it functioned ith their tab containers which made it worth the hassle.
How do panes scale for many groups? Can you manage 20, 30 panes? Or does it become annoying at this amount?
Sidebery is nice, but it's missing an API allowing other addons to interact with it. This is a big benefit of Tree Style Tabs, especially as you can even exploit it as a user.
I use Sidebery, and I added some custom userChrome.css to have the sidebar collapse to only take up 36px, and expand on hover, absolutely love using it
I switched to sideberry a while back, and yeah - very much agreed, it's leagues ahead of others in terms of base experience breadth (container tabs and whatnot are fully integrated) and customization options.
Their wiki also has a very simple and effective userChrome.css tweak to hide the top tab bar when the side panel is open. That's a rather crucial vertical space savings on a small laptop.
I've added commands to Tridactyl that expand/collapse the tabs I'm on in Tree Style Tabs, using their javascript API. Does Sidebery have anything like that?
Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly.
But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.
Also on Firefox you can hold CTRL+T / CTRL+W to open / close multiple tabs, CTRL+Click or SHIFT+Click to select multiple tabs at once and then e.g. move them to another window or close them, etc.
I always assumed Chrome also had all of these features, including scrolling, etc.
The lack of horizontal scrolling in Chrome and most chrome-based browsers drives me absolutely crazy, it's such a basic feature...
Firefox on the other hand has terrible support for profiles, I've been using Arc which is good but has worse performance when working with a lot of tabs (hundreds)
FF has said that they are finally adding groups, too, but I haven't heard anything about the timing of that. I'm really looking forward to that as I currently use a plugin for that and would love to drop the third-party plugin for something native. I'm always worried about the risk of a third-party plugin like that with such broad access.
I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.
> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either
Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year?
On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone.
Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.
I've liked Vivaldi a lot, including it's support for vertical tabs which I consider essential at this point. And they don't constantly mess around with the UI for no reason, unlike Chrome and Firefox. My main major gripe with it, is that it's closed source. I can see Brave is at least MPL, so I think I'll take a look at it.
The unfortunate thing is that Firefox could be the perfect platform for browser UI experimentation if more care were put into making the project easier to fork and reasonable to keep up to date with mainline.
A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.
Some forks are using a nice patch based system: see how the Zen browser is built for instance (https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/). I think that's a better model than merging upstream updates into your own branch.
> ... it does have groups and profiles.
You probably know this, but Firefox has its own version of profiles, although its a bit hidden.
You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window.
Container tabs are a much more powerful alternative to 'profiles'.
Profiles are nice for multiple people sharing a pc/account, container-tabs are for seperating online persona's or work/private browsing
FYI you also need a bit of custom CSS to get rid of the title bar if you want to replicate this screenshot. By default if you turn on vertical tabs you still have an empty title bar across the top.
Changing things just for the sake of changing them is the great bane of modern software. Consistency is a valuable feature! Don't throw it away without a VERY good reason! Meaning improving things is fine, changing them just for the sake of what some SV arsehole things is "modern" and "fresh" is not.
This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed.
In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.
In case it helps any reader, I recently discovered the [cmd + shift + a] / [control + shift + a] shortcut in chrome for ‘vertical tabs-ish’ in searchable form
This made me think of one thing that I've wanted to see for a long time with browsers: split-pane view.
In other words, the ability to see two browser sessions, side-by-side, with a vertical split between them. Two viewports, each with their group of tabs. The same type of view you can get in, for example, Notepad++ with its "Tab>Move to Other View", or Visual Studio's "Tab>New Vertical Document Group".
I frequently arrive at situations where I want to compare the contents of one webpage against the contents of another webpage. So far, the most usable option I've found is to split the 2nd tab off into a new window, then arrange the two windows side-by-side.
There is "Side View"[1], but that shows a bare viewport, which makes browsing in the 2nd viewport much more restricted than regular browsing.
OS window managers do a better job of that. Split view inside the browser has some thorny issues around making sure the user knows what resource they are interacting with. There is a lot of complexity when it comes to focus/blur in HTML, CSS, JS, etc.
Unpopular opinion: Tab management in browsers originally addressed the shortcomings of OS window management (see Windows XP and IE6, and the original Google Chrome tiling capability replicated into Windows 10/11 OS window management.
I do this all the time by just dragging a tab off so it's a second window (and hitting a key in my wm to make them side-by-side). The only problem is that the address bar turns so tiny it's impossible to read it among all the pointless icons that should've been in the overflow menu, I wish there were a way to make it prioritise showing the url instead of icons for "bookmark this page" and "certified by digicert" etc.
This is better accomplished by adding keyboard shortcuts to the browser for popping out a tab into a separate window, and then you can use the window manager’s shortcuts to arrange side-by-side, or however you want.
It’s preferable to have such building blocks of functionality, which one can then combine in many ways.
Use a tiling window manager and you can put anything side by side.
I find the tab paradigm very deficient, though. I used to think tabs were great (like everyone), until I learnt Emacs. Emacs doesn't have tabs. You can just open anything in any window at any time and split windows arbitrarily, even in text mode over SSH. It's so much better. Having each tab limited to some viewport is so unnecessarily limiting.
I regularly use 'split-view' with Firefox with the aid of a window manager, PaperWM (which is a horizontal scrolling WM for GNOME) to be exact. Just drag the tab out of the tab bar and the newly created window is automatically tiled to a sort of 'split-view' right next to the original one.
Yeah was about to say - i3 solves this as well, and does so in a general way rather than each app having its own split pane implementation.
Sometimes I want two browser session side by side. Sometimes I want a browser session next to Gimp or my IDE. Sometimes I want a 3-row terminal with that thing I’m keeping an eye on just below the browser.
- with extension like last_selected_tab AFAIR, or your own, to have content-secondary, handled - then hide any browser of other type with styles as well (as by default you have only: tabpanels > notificationbox > browser[type=content-primary] - being the active tab). :)
Opera had a very mature & expressive implementation of this feature back before version 15 (when they adopted Chromium). Since then, Vivaldi (created by Opera founder) is trying to rebuild all of the OG Opera features - they have this feature now; not as powerful as it once was but they're working on it.
I'm a little confused why your current solution of letting your window manager handle this is insufficient? I'll often have two or more windows of a browser open to have "paned" browsing.
Back in the XUL days there was an addon that did this. And it wasn't just two, I'm pretty sure you could split arbitrarily deep, both horizontal and vertical.
On a Mac I use Rectangle Pro for something similar, snapping my windows next to each other. It's not perfect but it does allow multiple sets of tabs at once.
> I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/
It's funny how we've gone full cycle. Early versions of Firefox get vertical tabs because the plugin system is very rich and you could do whatever you wanted with XUL. Firefox quantum comes around and kills XUL based extensions, vertical tabs are dead. Arc revives an ancient idea as something new and hip, firefox "responds" by reviving the very thing they killed.
1st. Tabs are both tabs and bookmarks. They exist to be more or less persistent (as long as you add them to folders - I get it, it's not everyone's workflow, but for people like me, it's a blessing).
2nd. It has a brilliant tab sync between devices. Something Firefox doesn't do - in fact, only Edge does that.
3rd. Is much lighter on resources on macOS. Some months ago I decided to give a - yet another - try at Firefox on my MacBook and I started not being able to do my full work day job on battery. At first, I didn't understand what was going on and thought it was docker that was killing the battery. Then I went to investigate, and yup, it was Firefox, again, after all these years of telling that now they are good on macOS. No, they aren't, they still use 4x more battery than Edge, or Arc, or Brave...
TLDR: Give Arc a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
They unfortunately ruined TST with the switch to WebExtensions because it could no longer replace the top tab bar. There were hacks you could do by modifying something in your Firefox profile directory.
Bizarre to me that they didn't take TST's popularity as a hint of supporting vertical tabs as a native feature until almost 7 years later.
>I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/
What age are you?
How long have you been using computers?
Sorry to be this blunt, but I am asking as Firefox has had addons for vertical tabs for a long time.
Vivaldi, Edge, Brave all have vertical tabs.
Opera Presto was first.
Why even mention this Arc? I feel like you just jumped on some hype train and you have been using Google Chrome and just recently found out about vertical tabs. Good for you but it is not a new development.
...and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality before Edge even existed (and about six years before Edge implemented it).
The only other browser (to my knowledge) that had native tabs earlier than Vivaldi was the original Opera browser, which was eventually killed, which in turn led to people leaving the company and creating Vivaldi.
It seems they took a cue from Arc for the pinned tabs icons. Now they only need to add tab groups a la Tab Stash, Sideberry or Tree Style Tab, and combine that with Sync. Still a lot of work ahead, but this looks very promising.
I use Edge for work and the vertical tabs with grouping works really nicely. On the other hand Arc's website made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Unfortunately it does indeed seem like that's what Firefox wants to ape.
I would imagine a minor browser would be less of an influence than the fact that most browsers have vertical tabs as an option at this point, or even just the slew of add-ons for Firefox itself.
I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and split view. I am really tired of resource hog, unstable arc. Want to return back to traditional browsers but they are not supporting vertical tabs like arc did. And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.
Most browsers except Chrome have some sort of vertical tabs support.
- Safari (Mac) has a vertical tabs, but a very confusing UI, mixing Profiles, Windows and Tab Groups (only 1 level).
- Edge has Workspaces and Vertical Tabs, along with Groups (only 1 level).
- Chrome does not have vertical tabs and has 1 level groups
- Vivaldi has vertical tabs and groups, not sure how many levels of grouping.
- Firefox has Containers and Vertical Tabs (today), but for best results you still need something like Tab Stash, Sideberry or TST.
- Orion Browser (Mac) has the best UI imho and allows for grouping tabs at as many levels as you want, but you cannot have proper "folders", only nested tabs.
- Arc gets everything right, in my opinion, but I do not specially care much for the candy UI.
I'm surprised that none of them support tree hierarchies (like tree style tabs / sideberry), which IMO is the reason to use 'vertical tabs' in the first place.
Actually somehow Safari has fastest load times, it just feel faster than anything. But man, I think it has ugliest UI :( I want to use Safari inside arc UI
Edge even has vertical tabs now. There are always add-ons, but I agree this should he a first class feature in all browsers.
The annoying thing about the vertical tabs in Edge is that Microsoft eliminated the vertical taskbar option in Windows 11. One step forward and two steps back.
> And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.
I really, really don't understand the hype around Arc. I tried it for a while and just wasn't at all impressed. I've heard, though, that a lot of people praise how it help them deal with hundreds of tabs, and I don't keep my tabs open, so maybe I'm the wrong audience?
(This is ignoring the fact that I tried it again a month ago and it wouldn't load a single page. I emailed their help and never heard from them, so I guess that's my last try for a while.)
I heard similar things from different people, so looks like it's not everyones taste. But you are right about arc's help is basically not working anymore.
I really, really want to like Vivaldi, but it's just so slow for me on Windows. It has a similar problem on Linux, though a restart a few times a day solves it.
Workplace had me move from Brave to Chrome and I was surprised that Chrome didn't have this feature. Brave's implementation felt like it was already a native part of Chromium, I guess they took existing parts and re-oriented it as I was surprised to learn there wasn't some experimental flag to enable it in Chrome either.
> Currently, there's now way to enable a wider sidebar that shows tab titles, too.
I think this is a bug, I had the same issue but then went to "Customize Sidebar" and toggled "Sidebar settings" to "Always show" and now I see titles, regardless of which sidebar show setting I have
Such a glaring oversight that I'm actually wondering if it was intentional. Causes engagement/sharing/spreading of other associated commentary/links on the release?
Cool.
But dammit why aren't tabs more modifiable.
I want to rename them. I want to assign an icon. I am okay if a tab takes up two vertical lines to make it entirely readable. There was an element of something really useful in MS 'Metro' UI -- just the fact that there could be variations in size of target/icon/links.
I currently 'pin' my mail and notes tab. These exist as specific functional tabs -- let me style them a bit differently or something.
Readit News
I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in terms of focus.
Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).
I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful" browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless" session, with the understanding that I can close any of these tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing anything important. If I do come across something important, it gets noted down elsewhere.
This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured, but are much more high-ceremony to create.
To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so that you can track, from which page did you open this link, what links did you open on this page, etc.
I can see the appeal of this, and more broadly, not having to think about tab management. But for me, I find I actively benefit from the process of deciding what to keep around.
Have you tried Arc? It's essentially completely designed around the concept you describe. I believe someone is actively working on an "ArcFox" clone of its behavior for Firefox, but I'm not sure what the current state of the project is.
Different people have different needs, so it is useful to distinguish between the two. For example: I have groups of bookmarks that I like to open as tabs in a separate window. If I only need them once a week, I want to close the window when I am done and pull them up again when they are needed. Fishing them out of a history of all of my browsing is something that I don't want to endure (even if they are stored in the history as a group).
Other people have other needs. Some only want an extremely limited number of tabs open at one time (presumably to help them focus).
I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.
Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
Firefox had this to back in ancient times, it was called Tab Candy, Panorama, or tab groups, depending on the release number. Then they killed it because "nobody used it."
Usually how I do it is at my office desk I have a second monitor I hook my laptop up to. So I open a new window, let that be the group, and then I use my mac for the terminal and my ipad sits to the side with spotify and any chat apps, out of the way and easy to dismiss.
What's extra satisfying is I'm a tab hoarder. But you finish a project and get to see all those tabs go away.
https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/6813b2c27611be03...
It's nowhere near perfect (see comments in the gist), but I genuinely enjoy the paradigm of easy access active tabs alongside a full laundry list. I find myself reinstalling it on new machines as I go. It's also just a few lines of CSS.
That said, keen to try out the nightly version of vertical tabs. Tho I'm hoping my active tabs hack might work with it too.
$Work is actively merging teams from different companies so I'm going to be juggling having to use different accounts on some SaaS platforms until we've gotten everything combined.
Sidebary has so many very useful and powerful features but I'm trying to be disciplined and mixing them in with my typical workflow 1 at a time and actually using it for a while before moving on to the next. (Ok, I might have gone full ham when I first installed it but it was so different from my normal flow that I quickly realized it was counter productive).
People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12 tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close attention to organization and establishing routines to cut down on distractions and reduce the possibility of variation in daily activities are very common coping strategies.
I have a similar amount regularly, and have never tried vertical tabs. I did recently start using all tabs helper though.
It's funny finding fellow tab hoarders online, people rarely hit the thousands - you're pretty much the first person I've encountered who's got more tabs open than me.
Btw what's your PC specs? I'm using a Framework 13 (7840u, 32gb ram) and am currently at 56% RAM usage. I find a fairly big difference when I'm connected to power and when I'm not, for some reason.
Could you qualify this? I always see the recommendation but I never see any reasons to prefer Sidebery over Tree-Style Tabs.
I followed the same trajectory. I now keep one window for more stable things that will be left open for a while (calendar, email, some long-lived task) and another for stuff I'm actively working on (the app I'm developing, docs for some API, etc). If I go over more than two windows with ~6 tabs each I just start closing things because I've almost certainly gone past the point of needing some of those tabs and if I need to get back to them it's usually faster to just retrace the steps I took to get to them in the first place or search in my history.
and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy
That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev
anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)
These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.
In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
I hadn't really thought about the side-by-side window thing, though, so I'll keep that in mind when debating vertical tabs. I usually run with a multi-monitor and while I do side-by-side with i3, that's on a large monitor so screen real estate isn't a problem.
Firefox has multiple ways you can do the tab search.
- Firefox View is an icon originally configured at the front of the tab bar that takes you to a dedicated page listing your tabs, recently visited, and lets you search tabs and otherwise manage them.
- Firefox has a tab search built into the address bar as soon as you enter the character '%' followed by a space. So for two sets of two keystrokes you're doing tab search: `Ctrl<L> + '% '`.
IMO the latter especially is fast and easy enough that I don't miss Chrome's tab search, and I often go into Firefox View just to see what I've got open and trim it down.
Nowadays I don't get the tabs "squished" at all. But that used to happen often, and with no impact on my capacity to use them.
it probably helped that I supplanted it with a better way to access history with vimium
For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and right. And all my other apps with tabs still use horizontal tabs, so I couldn't fully switch over to that model in my head. Additionally the URL is still at the top so it was more work to glance back and forth between the left of my browser for the tab and the URL at the top which in my mind are more "closely linked" for that to make sense.
But you also highlighted a good point, the limited space of traditional tabs does keep my organization in check. Once I get around the 20-tab mark and I'm unable to see any text beyond the website's favicon, I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to clean up.
I tend to sit with 20-40 tabs open, which is in the vicinity of how many a vertical tab list can accommodate comfortably, but I get about 4 letters per tab. If I needed to be able to see the text, I'd have to cap a window out at maybe 8 tabs, which is just unreasonable for some workflows.
I wish I had your discipline, I just open new browser windows and start more tabs there
Also don't get the benefit of the stateless session as a private window - you can just as well close a regular second browser window and not look back at history?
The fact that the second window is private isn't hugely relevant, it just helps to stop me from accidentally doing stateful things in it (and reduces cross-site tracking in the process). The point is that I never have to ask "is this tab important?", the decision was already made up-front, based on where I opened the tab in the first place.
Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either – but it does have groups and profiles. They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more, so I'm glad they finally found some time to do this.
https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1emmfvb/ive_just_f...
I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
[0] Argument is about having legitimate browser competition and the privacy boost of containerizing what data Google could (keyword) collect. I'd really only bring it up when he'd be complaining about Chrome or Google, so quite often.
[1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1197798
[2] https://kb.mozillazine.org/User.js_file
[3] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-...
The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better.
But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.
And there is nothing dependable about you failure to do something for many years because the UI is stable in not supporting it
True. I avoid the 2 largest chromium browsers because their innovations have a goal of exploiting end users.
* Safari has tab groups. I guess Firefox is working on it again
* FF 129 just got Tab previews, but you have to hover over each to see it. Safari can show you previews for everything in a tab group
It sounds like FF is catching up slowly, but compared to Safari's UI, still feel like IE6. I use it for uBlock mostly.
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
I am excited that FireFox is working this in by default so I don't have to keep fiddling with userChrome.css to get rid of the top tab bar.
I kinda dislike that Firefox only have one good option that involves completely hiding each group currently not in use, but it functioned ith their tab containers which made it worth the hassle.
If this does too, I'm switching permanently
Sidebery is nice, but it's missing an API allowing other addons to interact with it. This is a big benefit of Tree Style Tabs, especially as you can even exploit it as a user.
Their wiki also has a very simple and effective userChrome.css tweak to hide the top tab bar when the side panel is open. That's a rather crucial vertical space savings on a small laptop.
But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.
I always assumed Chrome also had all of these features, including scrolling, etc.
Firefox on the other hand has terrible support for profiles, I've been using Arc which is good but has worse performance when working with a lot of tabs (hundreds)
I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.
Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year?
On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone.
Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.
Dead Comment
A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.
You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window.
I do agree that this needs a better UI
This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed.
In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.
How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.
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In other words, the ability to see two browser sessions, side-by-side, with a vertical split between them. Two viewports, each with their group of tabs. The same type of view you can get in, for example, Notepad++ with its "Tab>Move to Other View", or Visual Studio's "Tab>New Vertical Document Group".
I frequently arrive at situations where I want to compare the contents of one webpage against the contents of another webpage. So far, the most usable option I've found is to split the 2nd tab off into a new window, then arrange the two windows side-by-side.
There is "Side View"[1], but that shows a bare viewport, which makes browsing in the 2nd viewport much more restricted than regular browsing.
[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/its-a-new-firef...
It’s preferable to have such building blocks of functionality, which one can then combine in many ways.
I find the tab paradigm very deficient, though. I used to think tabs were great (like everyone), until I learnt Emacs. Emacs doesn't have tabs. You can just open anything in any window at any time and split windows arbitrarily, even in text mode over SSH. It's so much better. Having each tab limited to some viewport is so unnecessarily limiting.
Sometimes I want two browser session side by side. Sometimes I want a browser session next to Gimp or my IDE. Sometimes I want a 3-row terminal with that thing I’m keeping an eye on just below the browser.
i3 to the rescue!
- use userChrome.css to display ALL tabs side by side:
profile/chrome/userChrome.css :
- with extension like last_selected_tab AFAIR, or your own, to have content-secondary, handled - then hide any browser of other type with styles as well (as by default you have only: tabpanels > notificationbox > browser[type=content-primary] - being the active tab). :)
We lost a lot when they abandoned that.
It's funny how we've gone full cycle. Early versions of Firefox get vertical tabs because the plugin system is very rich and you could do whatever you wanted with XUL. Firefox quantum comes around and kills XUL based extensions, vertical tabs are dead. Arc revives an ancient idea as something new and hip, firefox "responds" by reviving the very thing they killed.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
1st. Tabs are both tabs and bookmarks. They exist to be more or less persistent (as long as you add them to folders - I get it, it's not everyone's workflow, but for people like me, it's a blessing).
2nd. It has a brilliant tab sync between devices. Something Firefox doesn't do - in fact, only Edge does that.
3rd. Is much lighter on resources on macOS. Some months ago I decided to give a - yet another - try at Firefox on my MacBook and I started not being able to do my full work day job on battery. At first, I didn't understand what was going on and thought it was docker that was killing the battery. Then I went to investigate, and yup, it was Firefox, again, after all these years of telling that now they are good on macOS. No, they aren't, they still use 4x more battery than Edge, or Arc, or Brave...
TLDR: Give Arc a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
- like mplayer or vlc plugins to play every video format independently of browsers licence - right ?
> you could do whatever you wanted with XUL
- except undoing it (restartless extensions) - but you could do better without it anyway.. (XBL was to powerfull idea ;)
.. except since you couldn't hook in early enough to replace some XPCOM pieces before they are cached.. anymore.. RIP Firefox.
Here's a screenshot of what the feature looks like:
https://www.ghacks.net/2024/06/25/you-can-try-vertical-tabs-...
Bizarre to me that they didn't take TST's popularity as a hint of supporting vertical tabs as a native feature until almost 7 years later.
What age are you?
How long have you been using computers?
Sorry to be this blunt, but I am asking as Firefox has had addons for vertical tabs for a long time.
Vivaldi, Edge, Brave all have vertical tabs.
Opera Presto was first.
Why even mention this Arc? I feel like you just jumped on some hype train and you have been using Google Chrome and just recently found out about vertical tabs. Good for you but it is not a new development.
Firefox also had it via an extension.
The only other browser (to my knowledge) that had native tabs earlier than Vivaldi was the original Opera browser, which was eventually killed, which in turn led to people leaving the company and creating Vivaldi.
Kudos to the Firefox team.
Browser UIs have barely evolved in the past decade so I guess I'm excited that Firefox is trying something new.
So we are lonely in the dark :)
- Safari (Mac) has a vertical tabs, but a very confusing UI, mixing Profiles, Windows and Tab Groups (only 1 level).
- Edge has Workspaces and Vertical Tabs, along with Groups (only 1 level).
- Chrome does not have vertical tabs and has 1 level groups
- Vivaldi has vertical tabs and groups, not sure how many levels of grouping.
- Firefox has Containers and Vertical Tabs (today), but for best results you still need something like Tab Stash, Sideberry or TST.
- Orion Browser (Mac) has the best UI imho and allows for grouping tabs at as many levels as you want, but you cannot have proper "folders", only nested tabs.
- Arc gets everything right, in my opinion, but I do not specially care much for the candy UI.
The annoying thing about the vertical tabs in Edge is that Microsoft eliminated the vertical taskbar option in Windows 11. One step forward and two steps back.
Why is having a vertical option for the taskbar not on Win11? That sounds like one of the easiest features to port over.
I really, really don't understand the hype around Arc. I tried it for a while and just wasn't at all impressed. I've heard, though, that a lot of people praise how it help them deal with hundreds of tabs, and I don't keep my tabs open, so maybe I'm the wrong audience?
(This is ignoring the fact that I tried it again a month ago and it wouldn't load a single page. I emailed their help and never heard from them, so I guess that's my last try for a while.)
Edge, Brave, Vivaldi have native vertical tabs built in.
Firefox now too.
Opera Presto was first way before them all.
Why are you and another comment mention some no-name flashy browser?
I wish UI toolkits just came fully loaded and let me spin views and panels and anything in any which way I liked.
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https://imgur.com/hoOlRDy
Happy that this will finally be a feature of FF. Still pretty useless for me, though, for these reasons:
- There's an empty tab bar shown at the top of the window.
- Currently, there's now way to enable a wider sidebar that shows tab titles, too.
I think this is a bug, I had the same issue but then went to "Customize Sidebar" and toggled "Sidebar settings" to "Always show" and now I see titles, regardless of which sidebar show setting I have