Better browser UX, in my strongly-held opinion, starts with vertical tabs. With horizontal tabs, you can have maybe 6 to 8 tabs open before things tabs get difficult to manage or track.
With vertical, nested tabs; links that open in a new tab are automatically made a child tab. From that you can infer structure and context more easily than horizontal tabs. Then you add colours to indicate different sites and now you see tab groups more easily. On top of that you can bookmark tab trees, thus saving progress of your research, documentation, etc etc.
Once monitors got wider I moved everything left and vertical.
It's also kind of a hierarchy that flows from left to right:
OS -> App -> content
Some content follows the same pattern (or can be configured close enough)
Eg: discord servers -> channels -> discussion
Eg: IntelliJ -> project files -> vertical tab for open editors -> editor
Most content nowadays is mobile-first anyway, which is a nice way of saying it wastes most of the space on desktop (most webpages fit a title and subtitle OR 3 bullet points on a 24" screen)
I've got around one hundred firefox tabs open currently, distributed in multiple windows on 8 workspaces and dual monitor.
Horizontal tabs where always a design fail unless their number and title is fixed AND small. Made sense in physical cabinets because gravity wins and the space in a single drawer was limited.
With vertical, nested tabs; links that open in a new tab are automatically made a child tab. From that you can infer structure and context more easily than horizontal tabs. Then you add colours to indicate different sites and now you see tab groups more easily. On top of that you can bookmark tab trees, thus saving progress of your research, documentation, etc etc.
My CSS file and a couple of screenshots are here: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...
(I need to add a screenshot with nested and coloured tabs, will add that once I submit this comment)
Once monitors got wider I moved everything left and vertical.
It's also kind of a hierarchy that flows from left to right:
OS -> App -> content
Some content follows the same pattern (or can be configured close enough)
Eg: discord servers -> channels -> discussion
Eg: IntelliJ -> project files -> vertical tab for open editors -> editor
Most content nowadays is mobile-first anyway, which is a nice way of saying it wastes most of the space on desktop (most webpages fit a title and subtitle OR 3 bullet points on a 24" screen)
I've got around one hundred firefox tabs open currently, distributed in multiple windows on 8 workspaces and dual monitor.
Horizontal tabs where always a design fail unless their number and title is fixed AND small. Made sense in physical cabinets because gravity wins and the space in a single drawer was limited.