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.
Compared to pushing and implementing CSS, JS and HTML standards, cryptography, APIs, mobile OS release cycles etc, I've always wondered whether vertical tabs would've been an easy win.
Yeah, I remember it being a huge internal argument against WebExtensions at the time. (But, security + easy of building + compatibility + speed of developing Firefox + a bunch of other things made the switch off XUL the right choice)
I want to say they actually put some work in to allow TST to still work when they transitioned to quantum as it was a popular extension.
I got the impression they were eventually going to add back in the horizontal tab bar disable as well but if that was even true they clearly forgot about it. I've been using the userChrome hacks for close to 7 years now.
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 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.
It does, but you have to have some custom CSS to turn off the normal horizontal tabs, and you have to go and enable some options in about:config to even have custom CSS.
I've got something that works reasonably well, but it's really hard to have CSS that always works correctly.
The original XUL-based vertical tabs actually moved and restyled Firefox's native tabs, instead of creating a lookalike (which is all that's possible now). This meant that unrelated addons that did things like grey-out unloaded tabs, or alter the favicons to have some sort of indicator, still worked on the vertical tabs. The current vertical tabs addons all have to do it themselves or add some sort of API for the other addons to interact with to get the same effect.
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.
You can open tabs from other devices in Firefox. They don't open automatically though, presumably because some people (i.e. myself) would find that horrible.
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.
...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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe it’s likely due to usability issues on increasingly common small laptop screens. On a 12/13” screen for example hierarchal sidebars become a truncated mess after only 1-2 levels of nesting unless the sidebar is expanded and eating up valuable main content space.
Personally even 1-level vertical tabs are valuable because labels don’t get truncated or hidden nearly as badly as they do with traditional tabs, plus vertical scrolling is more natural and effortless than horizontal is. Additionally, most screens these days have tons of width while height is at a premium, and vertical tabs takes advantage of that.
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
> Actually somehow Safari has fastest load times, it just feel faster than anything
I guess that's easier when you only care about one platform, and everything that comes with it.
I wonder how fast you could make a browser if you don't make it cross-platform and only support usage on Linux for example. What things could you do if you don't care about cross-platform support?
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.
> 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've long been a big fan of Sidebery for vertical tab management, so I was expecting something closer to that than what I got.
The vertical tab view does work, although it seems pretty basic. E.g. there's no way to group any of the tabs or modify the display style. By default the tabs come in quite "chunky" as well.
Also, on another note, the toggles at the top of the sidebar keep restarting for me in nightly. I keep unchecking most of them since I don't need any Chatbot integrations or anything like that, but the selection doesn't stick.
Vertical tabs are fine, but this seems like catching up up with the other browsers.
I wished Firefox had natively supported tabs like in "Tree Style Tab" extensions. The extension is great, but out of the box it breaks some assumptions where the tabs appear and how they behave. I alway have to figure out which option to change after I install it. Having something native and polished would be a huge selling point for Firefox.
Their integration looks sloppy compared to Tree Style Tabs but I hope that I can separately disable top side tabs without enabling this because there are already plugins that are superior.
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.
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.
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.
I've been using vertical tabs (first TreeStyleTabs, now Sideberry for the last ~6 months) and I'm in the same boat.
Chrome is faster, snappier and works better on more websites I commonly use, but the fact that I cannot have "vertical tabs as trees" ruins the entire browser experience for me, so it's basically the only reason I use Firefox for the last decade or something.
Add NoScript and Firefox will be much faster than Chrome. It will make you aware of how much untrusted code poorly developed sites expect you to run on their behalf.
Well, turn off JavaScript in Chrome and you back to Chrome being faster. Turning off JS is obviously not a solution when the complaint is that (assuming the same amount of work) Chrome is faster for some JS.
NoScript doesn't turn off javascript. It allows you to selectively disable some scripts while whitelisting others. You can't use much of the modern web without JS but you can neuter the dozens of trackers and ad bloat some sites insist on running on your computer.
Running uBlock Origin in “Medium mode” [1] also does wonders (= blocking 3p-scripts and frames).
It’s interesting to see how many websites work in this mode, and the amount of crap you’re not seeing. Websites load so much faster. And, you can then (permanently, or not) easily whitelist some specific domains like content providers, etc. while browsing.
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?
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.
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.
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
> ... 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.
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.
I don't quite see them that way either, but, I further see tab grouping, tab hiding and profile groups as three separate parts of the same overall feature. And Simple Tab Groups directly supported Containers since day 1, so I personally always really found this distinction a bit more lexical than practical.
I absolutely love the hiding feature and find Containers incomplete without them. What's the point of switching context if the context is still visible there at all times? At that point, let me just use a different User. And I'd find Simple Tab Groups weirdly incomplete as well if they insisted on hiding tabs but not providing Container functionality. Because tab groups with hiding don't feel "ephemeral" enough. Takes too long to make a group, and the interface changes too much when jumping around. That dissuades me from going on tangents online and then grouping that tangent and keeping it on the side temporarily. Chrome's approach is better for that latter thing.
I want something in between. Something that let's you see all groups on a single bar or on a tree bar, and then further groups that can be containers and switch the bar. Chrome was close with their group save+hide feature, but they eat into the bookmarks bar with no options about where.
I'm not talking about Tab Containers. I don't need to segregate sessions/accounts or such.
Tab Groups is a way to be able to swap sets of tabs within a window. I can have groups for each of projects A, B, and C. Each project group can have a couple dozen tabs. When I switch groups, I only see the tabs for that group. I alternate among several projects each day and need to keep the pages live. Without groups, it is impossible to manage all of the tabs.
> 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".
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.
> on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving?
My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible.
We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history.
I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff.
I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are.
On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge.
I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world.
I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
Multiple tools from multiple people make it less likely that the entire ecosystem is going to collapse, but makes it likelier that any one tool will stop working.
But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software).
The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it.
I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.
When you ctrl+S to save a page, by default the first attempt fails, as evidenced by the warning icon in the Downloads button. You click it again to save it, and naturally it redownloads and reexecutes the page and all its resources again. Likewise if you save an already open image, more often than not even when it was just loaded, it will need to be downloaded again.
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.
As I remember it, Firefox succeeded because it fundamentally worked well and was very configurable, not because of the UX. The others at the time were bad at both of those things.
The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
In my opinion, Firefox has never been particularly good. I tried it when it first came out - it was slow and a memory hog. Using IE6 was a much better experience, so I stayed there. It was only once Chrome came out that we had an actual good alternative to IE, and I switched immediately once I tried it.
I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability.
FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
Everyone I knew who wasn't working in tech that switched to Firefox did so because tabs were this revolutionary new thing that transformed their browsing experience.
Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.
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.
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.
And usually stop working because they used up all the memory.
I went back to Firefox after a week of using Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with my 100+ open tabs.
The most important part of profiles is being able to right-click on a link and open it in a different profile. I don't see that mentioned. I typically have multiple profiles open at once.
Edge has the best implementation where you can define sites opening in certain profiles. Pity ms ruined that browser - it is completely untrustworthy with it auto turning on options such as syncing.
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)
I can't take a browser seriously unless it's open source. Arc may be the best browser of them all in terms of features, but I'd never consider it as an alternative to anything until it opens up its source code. We shouldn't trust a closed-source browser.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
I've got an ultra wide display and more horizontal than vertical space.
Also most websites scroll vertically and it feels better to have more in view at the same time. After 600px horizontally, most sites just render white space.
Horizontal tabs become a pain with more than a handful of tabs open, particularly on small screens. Vertical handles any number of tabs gracefully regardless of screen size.
Screens typically have much more horizontal space but ideal page text width has a limit so the sides end up as unused space. Also tab nesting can be very useful for organization.
1. Screens are usually wider than most web pages usefully support. This uses up space that would normally be wasted.
2. Most screens are wider than they're high. This is especially true of laptops. So using vertical space for a horizontal strip really eats into the vertical real estate.
3. Most written scripts are horizontal. As a result, lists are usually arranged vertically. This aligns with how lists in nearly every other context are arranged (how many times have you found a list where the second item is to the right of the first, the third to the right of the second, as opposed to them being on new vertically arranged lines?)
4. Since the text in most languages flow horizontally, it's trivially easy to adjust the width of a vertical tab container to customize how much of the text you want visible. This could range from really wide tab containers so you can see the entire title (which the larger width of monitors makes almost cost free) or you can make it really narrow to only include the icon, or somewhere in between. Arranging tabs horizontally provides no such easy and obvious UI to do such a thing, so you're reduced to either seeing fixed size tabs or icons only, controlled largely by the browser.
5. Again, because of horizontal text, tabs are shorter than they are wide. You can fit a lot more tabs in a vertical tabbar while still displaying their text than you could in a horizontal one.
But not as scalable. You either have a very wide horizontal ribbon which needs a lot of side scrolling, or a shallow depth that doesn't allow you to group as much.
There's a reason every tree/file explorer in existence is vertical :-)
Because you can fit more information and vertical scrolling is easier (you also have a bigger area to scroll in), so navigation is also more convenient
It's so bad compared to Sideberry. But hey, yet another way to view bookmarks and synced tabs that don't expose actually important functionality. Do they at least have the courage to excise Firefox View or whatever that useless pile was called?
Even if this is catch-up with respect with the other browser, I think that this mean that there would finally be a non-hacky way to disable the tab bar (i.e. a toggle rather than something that on userChrome.css).
I'm perfectly happy to have only basic vertical tab functionality on vanilla Firefox and Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry for power users. Presumably there would also be API that makes the life of piro (main dev of TST) and mbnuqw (main dev of Sideberry) easier ?
Do I understand this correctly that there is no new second sidebar, just the old sidebar, looking slightly different? And the new vertical tabs are just an inferior version of the already existing addons? Are there at least new APIs or bugfixes, so other addons get some benefit from this?
Might have to try this. I've been waiting for browser vendors to realize that users don't get joy from browsers themselves, they want the web-apps that browsers provide access to. If I notice my browser it's probably because the browser messed up.
Mobile browsers in particular seem to think it's critical that they take up at least 15% of screen space at all times.
I know that FF says that Tab Groups are on their roadmap but I hope that get to it soon. I'm tired of relying on third-party plugins for that function.
I like minimalism and use ZenFox (an ArcFox extension fork) to have an uncluttered Firefox interface with optional tabs sidebar. But it still needs many configuration to heavily modify the UI.
Hope this new functionality is only the first step making Firefox more flexible !
Firefox already has a sidebar and a selection of extensions which put tabs in it, also adding many extra conveniences. For example on the computer I am now using to write this I use Tab Center Reborn which also adds a tab filter field which is very handy.
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.
You can also group tabs in the vertical view but also create separate „workspaces“ (to distinquish between different projects or even private <> work).
Though the most innovative feauture is their deep integration of services like Notion, GitHub, telegram etc.
Quite astonishing actually and definitely one of my favourite pieces of software.
Seems to me that Arc is inspired by Operating Systems in general.
- Workspaces/Desktops with mouse gestures
- Spotlight like Quick Launch
- Alt Tab like Tab switch
- Window management within the browser
- Dedicated area for Media control
- Widgets on mouse hover
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.
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.
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.
Tabs state management is simpler and more battle tested. Split pane browsers will need to relearn some of the same problems/security found when tabed browsing was introduced. They will have unique problems/security as well. I would be interested to see how split pane browsers deal with focus stealing JS especially with timeouts or other shenanigans.
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 also share this opinion. I think we are in a local maximum with tabs. But getting out of it request a lot of coordination between browsers and each desktop environment so it is unlikely to ever happen. Maybe less portable browsers like GNOME Web or Safari that only "need" to deal with one desktop environment can manage it at some point.
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.
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.
- 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). :)
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.
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.
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.
363 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 287 ms ] threadHere'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.
I got the impression they were eventually going to add back in the horizontal tab bar disable as well but if that was even true they clearly forgot about it. I've been using the userChrome hacks for close to 7 years now.
Kudos to the Firefox team.
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...
I've got something that works reasonably well, but it's really hard to have CSS that always works correctly.
- 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.
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.
That, together with clearly defined workspaces, is fantastic for me.
Browser UIs have barely evolved in the past decade so I guess I'm excited that Firefox is trying something new.
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.
https://imgur.com/a/HWaxm0P (from 2009)
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.
So we are lonely in the dark :)
Is it slow with a fresh profile? It can become suprisingly slow as session files grow, but cleaning it can revert some of that
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.
- 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.
Personally even 1-level vertical tabs are valuable because labels don’t get truncated or hidden nearly as badly as they do with traditional tabs, plus vertical scrolling is more natural and effortless than horizontal is. Additionally, most screens these days have tons of width while height is at a premium, and vertical tabs takes advantage of that.
I guess that's easier when you only care about one platform, and everything that comes with it.
I wonder how fast you could make a browser if you don't make it cross-platform and only support usage on Linux for example. What things could you do if you don't care about cross-platform support?
I wish UI toolkits just came fully loaded and let me spin views and panels and anything in any which way I liked.
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'm concerned it will conflict with Tree Style Tabs, and/or my custom UI CSS.
But it will be very nice to bring more folks into the Vertical Tabs Cult ;)
I've long been a big fan of Sidebery for vertical tab management, so I was expecting something closer to that than what I got. The vertical tab view does work, although it seems pretty basic. E.g. there's no way to group any of the tabs or modify the display style. By default the tabs come in quite "chunky" as well.
Also, on another note, the toggles at the top of the sidebar keep restarting for me in nightly. I keep unchecking most of them since I don't need any Chatbot integrations or anything like that, but the selection doesn't stick.
I wished Firefox had natively supported tabs like in "Tree Style Tab" extensions. The extension is great, but out of the box it breaks some assumptions where the tabs appear and how they behave. I alway have to figure out which option to change after I install it. Having something native and polished would be a huge selling point for Firefox.
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...
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.
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
Chrome is faster, snappier and works better on more websites I commonly use, but the fact that I cannot have "vertical tabs as trees" ruins the entire browser experience for me, so it's basically the only reason I use Firefox for the last decade or something.
[1] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Blocking-mode:-medium...
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 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.
Hey, look on the bright side: maybe chromium will get vertical tabs soon!
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 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
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
How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.
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.
Simple Tab Groups separates context for the user, i.e. hides the tabs of inactive groups (while also supporting containers). It's not the same thing.
I absolutely love the hiding feature and find Containers incomplete without them. What's the point of switching context if the context is still visible there at all times? At that point, let me just use a different User. And I'd find Simple Tab Groups weirdly incomplete as well if they insisted on hiding tabs but not providing Container functionality. Because tab groups with hiding don't feel "ephemeral" enough. Takes too long to make a group, and the interface changes too much when jumping around. That dissuades me from going on tangents online and then grouping that tangent and keeping it on the side temporarily. Chrome's approach is better for that latter thing.
I want something in between. Something that let's you see all groups on a single bar or on a tree bar, and then further groups that can be containers and switch the bar. Chrome was close with their group save+hide feature, but they eat into the bookmarks bar with no options about where.
Tab Groups is a way to be able to swap sets of tabs within a window. I can have groups for each of projects A, B, and C. Each project group can have a couple dozen tabs. When I switch groups, I only see the tabs for that group. I alternate among several projects each day and need to keep the pages live. Without groups, it is impossible to manage all of the tabs.
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".
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.
Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving?
My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible.
We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history.
I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff.
I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are.
On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge.
I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software).
The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it.
I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.
True. I avoid the 2 largest chromium browsers because their innovations have a goal of exploiting end users.
And there is nothing dependable about you failure to do something for many years because the UI is stable in not supporting it
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.
The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability.
FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.
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-...
This project fixes it and it's easy to install : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix
* 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.
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.
https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-remove...
Edge has the best implementation where you can define sites opening in certain profiles. Pity ms ruined that browser - it is completely untrustworthy with it auto turning on options such as syncing.
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 always assumed Chrome also had all of these features, including scrolling, etc.
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.
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.
I tried TST once but didn’t get why they were bettter than horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.
Also most websites scroll vertically and it feels better to have more in view at the same time. After 600px horizontally, most sites just render white space.
2. Most screens are wider than they're high. This is especially true of laptops. So using vertical space for a horizontal strip really eats into the vertical real estate.
3. Most written scripts are horizontal. As a result, lists are usually arranged vertically. This aligns with how lists in nearly every other context are arranged (how many times have you found a list where the second item is to the right of the first, the third to the right of the second, as opposed to them being on new vertically arranged lines?)
4. Since the text in most languages flow horizontally, it's trivially easy to adjust the width of a vertical tab container to customize how much of the text you want visible. This could range from really wide tab containers so you can see the entire title (which the larger width of monitors makes almost cost free) or you can make it really narrow to only include the icon, or somewhere in between. Arranging tabs horizontally provides no such easy and obvious UI to do such a thing, so you're reduced to either seeing fixed size tabs or icons only, controlled largely by the browser.
5. Again, because of horizontal text, tabs are shorter than they are wide. You can fit a lot more tabs in a vertical tabbar while still displaying their text than you could in a horizontal one.
There's a reason every tree/file explorer in existence is vertical :-)
I'm perfectly happy to have only basic vertical tab functionality on vanilla Firefox and Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry for power users. Presumably there would also be API that makes the life of piro (main dev of TST) and mbnuqw (main dev of Sideberry) easier ?
Mobile browsers in particular seem to think it's critical that they take up at least 15% of screen space at all times.
This is a nice step forward.
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...
Though the most innovative feauture is their deep integration of services like Notion, GitHub, telegram etc.
Quite astonishing actually and definitely one of my favourite pieces of software.
- Workspaces/Desktops with mouse gestures - Spotlight like Quick Launch - Alt Tab like Tab switch - Window management within the browser - Dedicated area for Media control - Widgets on mouse hover
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!
Tabs are tabs, they’re not windows. Next thing you tell me is that they should implement virtual desktops and loading tabs remotely.
They are already tiny window managers, and may as well lean into it.
https://kevincox.ca/2021/01/11/tabs-were-a-mistake/
It’s preferable to have such building blocks of functionality, which one can then combine in many ways.
- 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.
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.