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.
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.
Meanwhile here I am, using an ultrawide 21:9 monitor and loving it as I can easily split it in two or three columns whenever I need. I don't understand why people like squarish monitors so much, the human FOV is not square.
How is the human FOV relevant? I just want to be able to fit as much vertical content into the visible area as possible. Because almost all documents we use are vertically organized.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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
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)
The latter is more valuable to the ad tech industry. In fact, they benefit from browsers with crippled bookmarking systems. Every time a user types in "facebook" instead of facebook.com into the omnibar, that user is directed to a Google/Bing/Brave Search page with ads.
I can't live with Braves terrible bookmark manager, and inability to save history for more than a few months. But I can't live without the flawless ad blocking.
Data that is shared with Google/Bing/etc. It worries me that the omnibar is enabled by default and records what people search for, let alone employees of major companies, governments, and institutions.
Never liked vertical tabs. Horses for courses, personal preference and all that. My muscle memory for normal/horizontal tab layouts is so ingrained in me, that using anything different would take on a huge unlearning.
I used Opera over other browsers for a long time for performance reasons, it had M2, my favorite email client ever to this day, which got rid of traditional "folders", there's an alternate timeline somewhere where Opera won the browser wars and they already have flying cars and a federated web.
Yep, OmniWeb was the first place I saw the of the vertical tabs back in the mid-00s. Blew my mind.
The concept of “drawers” that OS X had at the time was well suited for this kind of thing, with some “free” (in terms of dev effort) flexibility of allowing the user to choose which edge they unfurled from. It’s too bad they fell out of style in favor of much more static sidebars.
I don't really think anyone is copying anyone here. This is a popular feature for browsers that has been around for over a decade.
Orion[1] is another recent MacOS browser that released before Arc in 2021 and has vertical tabs. Edge had vertical tabs as an experiment back in 2020[2] and is full feature now. Vivaldi has had vertical tabs since 2015[3]. It might not count since it's not built in, but Firefox has had vertical tab extensions since 2007[4].
The crucial difference is keeping the address bar- this is where I think Arc is falling short. Maybe it's me, but I have an extremely difficult time reprogramming my expectations of where the address bar should be.
I've been using vertical tabs for well over a decade starting with Opera, then tree style tabs for Firefox, and now Vivaldi. I refuse to use a browser without the ability. Arc hasn't innovated anything there.
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.
I really liked brave and this is an interesting feature, but I had to stop using it when I tried syncing my bookmarks - for some reason, a bunch ended up duplicating, and I have a lot of bookmarks that are well organized.
Otherwise, I would have kept using it - it was fast and energy efficient on my intel macbook, way better than chrome.
I also have to say - I hate when I have so many tabs open. It's basically a manifestation of my ADHD. I need to focus one thing at a time.
I see the name “Brave Browser” and my brain just refuses to engage. Their marketing team ruined the product for me before I ever got the chance to try it.
There are no problems with the browser. It's the PR surrounding it. Clickbaity tech news websites have been trying to ruin Brave's reputation while Brave users continue to enjoy a fully FOSS browser with the best privacy period.
Why do people need dozens or hundreds of tabs to the point that they need groups for them? We've had bookmarks (and folders for them) for decades... It made way more sense when you could expect tabs to always be loaded, and not behave like another set of bookmarks.
Bookmarks have management overhead and are too easily forgotten about. For a lot of people tabs serve as a sort of to-do list or with groups, repositories for sites that will briefly be useful for a certain task in the near future. They naturally get closed as they’re done with, eschewing any kind of cleanup step as is necessary with bookmarks.
That sounds like how I use tabs but doesn't explain how people end up with enough tabs open to make them impossible to navigate in a horizontal layout and without grouping them. When I'm done with a tab, I close it. If I'm going back to it later, I leave it and... go back to it later. If I don't, I close it... or I bookmark it. I don't see how you go from using tabs as a short-term "read later" feature to having several dozens of them open at any given time. And while deleting bookmarks takes a second to do, so does going through your tabs to get rid of the ones that haven't been useful in 2 months. Personally, if I run out of horizontal space I consider it a good reminder to clean up, but then I see people with so many tabs that all they see is a ton of icons, and I wonder if they even know that bookmarks exist. That image came to mind as I read some of the other comments under this post, and I feel like we're just reinventing bookmarks for people who don't realize that bookmarks exist (bookmarks have been deemphasized for a while through trends like hiding the bookmarks toolbar by default).
I used that on Opera way back in the day (before the Blink rewrite). Back then there weren't any Firefox extensions that I liked (either too complex or too 'janky', IIRC) so I just gave up on vertical tabs and grouping, but maybe I should look at it again as that was years ago. Thanks!
It's more convenient to keep tabs open. With Tree Style Tabs on Firefox and Orion's vertical tabs I can retain the relationship. The browser generally keeps it cached so even if the site goes offline I can read what I need to. If I have a form partially entered, I can resume it. If the page has infinite scroll but doesn't update the URL, I can stay where I was. Some sites tie resources to a particular session so resuming from a bookmark won't get you to the resource anyway.
But, I can also find things faster if they're on a pile on my desk than I can if they're put away in a drawer so I'm sure it's different for everyone.
As for tooling, I think browsers just aren't very good at bookmark management. I find the sidebar for bookmarks borderline useless, but a tree of tabs in the same space is quite efficient for me. The bookmark manager isn't much better. We can use folders, but not really have the rich links the web was designed for. I often have both the HN discussion and article open with either a parent-child or sibling relationship in my vertical tabs. That's not easily replicated with bookmarks.
The other tooling issue is tab management isn't great. Chrome's shrinking tabs is terrible HCI; you can't read them and they become harder to click. Finding a tab can be frustrating. It's often easier to open a new tab to complete a task than go hunting for the one I want. Pinning tabs doesn't work great with multiple windows and seeing just the favicon isn't super helpful if you need to pin two pages from the same domain.
Between the tabs I keep open because that's how my brain works best and between tabs I get stuck with because browsers haven't provided better tooling, it's easy to grow into the hundreds and then periodically cull them.
Because bookmarks are a bad separate UI, the tabs and sessions are right there and retain your currently working scheme, and also don't include something you worked on 10 years ago and saved in the same folder
And the content of tabs is also cached/loaded unlike with bookmarks
Brave gives a very bad vibe (mostly due to the affiliate links scandal), I prefer to just use my favorite browsers (ff/edge) + uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger which give good privacy/adblock experience, are open source and customizable to my liking.
A minor autocomplete mistake from 2 years ago (quickly fixed and apologised for by the CEO [1]) is framed as a 'scandal'.
Meanwhile Mozilla is showing signs of serious, systemic internal org issues, and no problem? [2]
It's pretty clear a user / privacy-first model is central to Brave's mission, so these drive-by comments griping loudly about minor, historical issues never feel intellectually compelling.
Brave's encroachments can be turned off. On a new install, I disable the search bar Rewards icon, extensions area Wallet, and new tab page Sponsored Images, News, and Cards. (And maybe others still). Each of these requires active engagement from a user to produce and signal for a 3rd party.
Meanwhile, they also fund novel privacy and security research [1], including preventing advanced fingerprinting. In essence, the maintain a patch set on top of Chromium (the open source base of Chrome, that Edge also builds on) which more convincingly respects user privacy, security, and choice[2][3][4]. See how much effort they put into keeping Brave Ads convincingly private [5].
Each of these is less intrusive than changes (to stay recent and relevant) include direct partnership for promotions [6].
Or to base beliefs on a series of news reports that sound bad, see a longer list [7], though it's quite noisy list.
It had a major downside of putting browser chrome over the page area and hiding the URL. Over time the latter has become the default anyways but the former is still iffy. Safari approached this concept more recently, as the only browser I'm aware with this as an officially supported option, but put the URL bar directly in the tab, which is a bit more awkward to use. On Vivaldi there is the option to hide it but then activate it via a keyboard shortcut/gesture, which functions similarly but can cause extra switching between keyboard based navigation and mouse based navigation (the latter of which can be very hard to avoid). Because of the way Vivaldi is implemented it's always performed a lot worse than other Chromium based browsers for me as well. In Firefox there were several CSS hacks for this but it was constantly falling apart on updates so I gave up on it.
I guess the long story short is: as a very light tab user (1-8 throughout the day) I miss this old option in Chrom* greatly.
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.
Except that you could actually use it instead of being a legendary project we only heard about but very few people actually used. That makes it all the more painful that it was taken away.
I've had vertical tabs in Vivaldi for a little while now. I hope you guys enjoy it over on Brave as well, they change how you use tabs. Strongly recommended.
Vivaldi is great, but I've hidden the tab bar, and use the window panel instead. Then you get a nice tree view of tabs (nested, grouped by domain etc) and windows. Kind of treating my tabs as bookmarks, which is probably why it consumes a lot of memory :-)
I guess the last part is fixed in later chromium by hibernating tabs now?
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
I'm not the person you asked but I love it. It's actually solved my tab hoarding problem and made my life so much simpler. Caveat: I'm an ADHD sufferer so my experience may not be typical.
I actually have ADHD(I) as well, and have been trying to battle tab/bookmark hoarding myself. It seems Vivaldi is working well, but I was wondering what Arc has to offer.
You likely know what I'm talking about, tab pinning is broken in all mainstream browsers, it isn't broken in Arc. In addition, you can pin groups of multiple tabs tilled side by side (not very useful without a wide screen, but still)
It’s highly limited compared to the tiling in Vivaldi. You can only tile 2 tabs at a time. Arc also doesn’t seem to have horizontal tabs so you lose 10-20% of your screen space to the vertical tabs bar which gets annoying. I do like Arc but there are some basic things missing that make it hard to use.
Maybe you tried it a while ago? You can tile unlimited tabs either horizontally or vertically (but not both). I've never found any reason to tile any thing vertically anyway, the web just isn't designed for small horizontal windows.
I use an ultrawide 32" screen and even for window tilling I use PaperWM (technically a Hammerspoon script because PaperWM isn't on MacOS). So I only need to navigate windows/tabs in one dimension (horizontally).
Arc does have the benefits of native UI, Vivaldi at least when I tried a couple of months ago was very janky, presumably because the browser chrome is written in React.
Somewhere in this thread people mentioned Stack browser which is actually closer to PaperWM in terms of how it tiles tabs. For both Arc and Vivaldi it's very annoying if you resize (going fullscreen and back) windows with tiles because the size of the tiles gets messed up. Stack just keeps the size and make them scrollable.
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.
To save you time trying it out, their implementation of tiling is better than that of Arc. Unfortunately it suffers the same problem most mainstream browsers do: broken pinned tabs, and there is no pinned tab groups like Arc
That's such a wasted design opportunity - give the users freedom in using a proper text editing tool instead of whatever awfulness the OS designers got stuck in decade(s) ago
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
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, it did include IRC client, FTP client, email client and download manager with torrent support (not 100% sure if all at the same time, because it has been many years and versions blur in my mind).
The funny thing is that even though it included a lot of features I didn't use (for example, I never used the email client, not because it was bad, but I didn't use POP3/IMAP in general during that period), it was still much more efficient than all competitors in terms of speed, memory usage and even download size (at some point it boasted to be the only browser that fit in a floppy disk, although of course not for long).
I think the reason why it never became mainstream is that it was a paid product for a long time, while all other browsers were free. It eventually became free, but by then, competitors were too entrenched.
I also dislike Whatsapp but depending on country, it might be a necessary evil. In Spain for example, not having Whatsapp practically means forgoing any socialization with non-nerds. It's so ingrained in daily life that being without it is almost unthinkable for most people. Anyway, the current Opera doesn't have almost anything in common with the original one. Different engine, company, team, vision and even continent (owned by a Chinese company), only the brand and a thin sliver of identity remains.
(The sad thing is that I use it, because I still find it to be the least bad option for my needs...).
I remember reading about Opera back in the day, the reason it was not bloated was that all these features were packaged as separate dlls and only loaded when if you tried to actually use them
Also for a long time one of their main marketing points was that it had really small binary size so you could download it fast. They really spent a lot of engineering in making it performant
Opera got sold and the people who used to work there now continue their work at Vivaldi. Love their browser: strong focus on keyboard users, fast, privacy oriented.
> Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now.
Opera was sold to a Chinese company in the mid-10s and introduced suspicious stuff like a built-in free VPN. It is basically ignored nowadays.
The original CEO started Vivaldi, which is an excellent browser in terms of features - tiling tabs [0] were a favourite of mine. Unfortunately it is closed-source and chatty [1], but I still like on devices where privacy is not a concern.
Yuck, what a disgustingly misleading front page then. I installed it today after it was mentioned and played with it and really like it, but this is worse than Ungoogled Chromium. I guess I won't be switching to it. Thanks for the heads up.
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.
> 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).
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.
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 qu...
The crypto wallet video ad in the middle of the article is intrusive and frankly infuriating, especially when there is no video illustrating the lifecycle of the new vertical tabs.
That's Brave for you. The founder is a crypto nut, and the browser is adware (shows ads itself instead of merely rendering ads on third party websites).
Because you opted out. The browser is ad-supported though, their whole business model is supposedly built on the users opting in to view strictly controlled ads for cryptocurrency rewards, at the same time stripping the existing ads from the sites, forcing the websites to use Brave Software as the middleman if they want a share of their ad revenue.
GP's point was that the browser is adware. It really is - it exists on the advertisement revenue, even if you could use it without viewing ads. Rewards are neither opt-in nor opt-out: during the installation you're offered to try them, have to make your choice, and disable the UI elements afterwards with a relaunch.
More and more I've wanted a browser based on WebKit/Blink from a company with the original Mozilla's values. I know this will get a lot of flack, but Gecko feels way too antiquated for what I want out of a modern browser. Not to mention, browsers are significantly complicated that splitting developer efforts just doesn't seem like a good idea; Firefox keeps falling further behind in term of modern features.
The Orion browser has had this for a while and has the best native implementation by far I just hope they don’t remain pigeonholed into apple OS as they currently are
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 291 ms ] threadIn 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.
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.
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.
(Not a user of the browser in question)
But Cmd+L+C is exactly the same number of sequential keypresses as Cmd+Shift+C. So I guess Firefox has this desirable behaviour covered!
So, looks like I’ll move to that when Apollo shuts down.
Works with Twitter too - I’m a noob smh.
*looks like I’m wrong- now not loading. Oh well.
But as with you, my muscle memory gets in the way.
https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en#history
I am not sure if someone like Opera was earlier, but Arc is likely copying this.
OmniWeb 5.0, 2004: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/02/ow5/3/#tabs
edit: Started up a VM -- Opera 3 didnt have tabs at all, although it did already have an MDI.
The concept of “drawers” that OS X had at the time was well suited for this kind of thing, with some “free” (in terms of dev effort) flexibility of allowing the user to choose which edge they unfurled from. It’s too bad they fell out of style in favor of much more static sidebars.
Orion[1] is another recent MacOS browser that released before Arc in 2021 and has vertical tabs. Edge had vertical tabs as an experiment back in 2020[2] and is full feature now. Vivaldi has had vertical tabs since 2015[3]. It might not count since it's not built in, but Firefox has had vertical tab extensions since 2007[4].
[1]https://browser.kagi.com/
[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...
[3]https://www.maketecheasier.com/vertical-tabs-browsers/
[4]https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/graphs/contributors
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.
Otherwise, I would have kept using it - it was fast and energy efficient on my intel macbook, way better than chrome.
I also have to say - I hate when I have so many tabs open. It's basically a manifestation of my ADHD. I need to focus one thing at a time.
I jest, but I don't think I get what you are implying. What is the difference between this fantasy name and any other that is also an existing noun?
For once can we just skip the inevitable discussion that takes place in every single brave thread?
Thanks and sorry - I didn't mean to start a thread that is not useful for most people
* cryptocurrency related bits, relation to BAT token
* Fiasco where they collected earnings on behalf of creators without their consent/knowledge/optin
* Run by Brendan Eich who some people don’t like because he created javascript, and/or is not supportive of gay people in some ways
I am sure I am forgetting some
Not sure I follow.
I used Firefox for 20 years but had to switch to a Chromium browser due to performance. Went with Brave, seemed to be the best of the bunch.
I've been happy with it. What's the problem with the name?
- I spend time researching X, have a few pages open for that, get bored with it, want to continue in a few days.
- I work on X, which has a few related tabs open, and I need to switch to Y for a bit.
- There's a long-term thing I'm working on and off.
- Something I found and want to look at later; "bookmarks-light" (bookmarks might as well be /dev/null for me).
But, I can also find things faster if they're on a pile on my desk than I can if they're put away in a drawer so I'm sure it's different for everyone.
As for tooling, I think browsers just aren't very good at bookmark management. I find the sidebar for bookmarks borderline useless, but a tree of tabs in the same space is quite efficient for me. The bookmark manager isn't much better. We can use folders, but not really have the rich links the web was designed for. I often have both the HN discussion and article open with either a parent-child or sibling relationship in my vertical tabs. That's not easily replicated with bookmarks.
The other tooling issue is tab management isn't great. Chrome's shrinking tabs is terrible HCI; you can't read them and they become harder to click. Finding a tab can be frustrating. It's often easier to open a new tab to complete a task than go hunting for the one I want. Pinning tabs doesn't work great with multiple windows and seeing just the favicon isn't super helpful if you need to pin two pages from the same domain.
Between the tabs I keep open because that's how my brain works best and between tabs I get stuck with because browsers haven't provided better tooling, it's easy to grow into the hundreds and then periodically cull them.
And the content of tabs is also cached/loaded unlike with bookmarks
Meanwhile Mozilla is showing signs of serious, systemic internal org issues, and no problem? [2]
It's pretty clear a user / privacy-first model is central to Brave's mission, so these drive-by comments griping loudly about minor, historical issues never feel intellectually compelling.
[1] https://twitter.com/BrendanEich/status/1269317625915400192
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36077360
Meanwhile, they also fund novel privacy and security research [1], including preventing advanced fingerprinting. In essence, the maintain a patch set on top of Chromium (the open source base of Chrome, that Edge also builds on) which more convincingly respects user privacy, security, and choice[2][3][4]. See how much effort they put into keeping Brave Ads convincingly private [5].
Each of these is less intrusive than changes (to stay recent and relevant) include direct partnership for promotions [6].
Or to base beliefs on a series of news reports that sound bad, see a longer list [7], though it's quite noisy list.
[1]: https://brave.com/research/
[2]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14942
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts
[4]: https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/
[5]: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026361072-Bra...
[6]: https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/
[7]: https://chefkochblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/03/mozilla-histor...
It had a major downside of putting browser chrome over the page area and hiding the URL. Over time the latter has become the default anyways but the former is still iffy. Safari approached this concept more recently, as the only browser I'm aware with this as an officially supported option, but put the URL bar directly in the tab, which is a bit more awkward to use. On Vivaldi there is the option to hide it but then activate it via a keyboard shortcut/gesture, which functions similarly but can cause extra switching between keyboard based navigation and mouse based navigation (the latter of which can be very hard to avoid). Because of the way Vivaldi is implemented it's always performed a lot worse than other Chromium based browsers for me as well. In Firefox there were several CSS hacks for this but it was constantly falling apart on updates so I gave up on it.
I guess the long story short is: as a very light tab user (1-8 throughout the day) I miss this old option in Chrom* greatly.
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.
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.
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 guess the last part is fixed in later chromium by hibernating tabs now?
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/
What are your impressions of it?
I use an ultrawide 32" screen and even for window tilling I use PaperWM (technically a Hammerspoon script because PaperWM isn't on MacOS). So I only need to navigate windows/tabs in one dimension (horizontally).
Arc does have the benefits of native UI, Vivaldi at least when I tried a couple of months ago was very janky, presumably because the browser chrome is written in React.
Somewhere in this thread people mentioned Stack browser which is actually closer to PaperWM in terms of how it tiles tabs. For both Arc and Vivaldi it's very annoying if you resize (going fullscreen and back) windows with tiles because the size of the tiles gets messed up. Stack just keeps the size and make them scrollable.
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.
Yes, plugging and unplugging is a major pain. I often find my windows re-appear on the wrong screen. And sometimes the wrong desktop… which is weird.
That's such a wasted design opportunity - give the users freedom in using a proper text editing tool instead of whatever awfulness the OS designers got stuck in decade(s) ago
But there are many other minimal UI browsers as well as Firefox that support no tabs.
I’ve been using qutebrowser which doesn’t have much of a UI since it is vim based
I'm using Firefox with a custom userChrome.css:
#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }
Works quite ok but I cannot disable opening tabs completely in Firefox.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
[*] https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/GUI.html#stack-ti...
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.
The funny thing is that even though it included a lot of features I didn't use (for example, I never used the email client, not because it was bad, but I didn't use POP3/IMAP in general during that period), it was still much more efficient than all competitors in terms of speed, memory usage and even download size (at some point it boasted to be the only browser that fit in a floppy disk, although of course not for long).
I think the reason why it never became mainstream is that it was a paid product for a long time, while all other browsers were free. It eventually became free, but by then, competitors were too entrenched.
I also dislike Whatsapp but depending on country, it might be a necessary evil. In Spain for example, not having Whatsapp practically means forgoing any socialization with non-nerds. It's so ingrained in daily life that being without it is almost unthinkable for most people. Anyway, the current Opera doesn't have almost anything in common with the original one. Different engine, company, team, vision and even continent (owned by a Chinese company), only the brand and a thin sliver of identity remains.
(The sad thing is that I use it, because I still find it to be the least bad option for my needs...).
Also for a long time one of their main marketing points was that it had really small binary size so you could download it fast. They really spent a lot of engineering in making it performant
https://vivaldi.com
It's always worrying (and intriguing) when a small upstart decides to go closed-source when essentially the entire market is open-source.
Opera was sold to a Chinese company in the mid-10s and introduced suspicious stuff like a built-in free VPN. It is basically ignored nowadays.
The original CEO started Vivaldi, which is an excellent browser in terms of features - tiling tabs [0] were a favourite of mine. Unfortunately it is closed-source and chatty [1], but I still like on devices where privacy is not a concern.
[0] https://help.vivaldi.com/desktop/tabs/tab-tiling/
[1] https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/vivaldi
like you can have multiple windows side by side, so what's the benefit of panes?
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).
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.
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 qu...
Haven't seen an ad in... years. For crypto or otherwise.
Been using the browser for 2 years and yet to see an ad.
Most features in Brave are opt-in, not opt-out. I don't know why people think otherwise. This is not Chrome or Edge.
Besides, I'd rather have this level of adware than Chrome level of spyware.
It's also a lot better than any other mainstream browser out there. Firefox has tons of ads too and Chrome and Edge, let's not go there.
Why not go there? Because it shows Brave is adware and Chrome is not? What ads does Chrome have? Even to opt-in to?
Note that Brave's opt in dialog is itself an ad. After you dismiss it, the ad continues to live permanently in browser settings.