It’s better to integrate Tree Style Tab addon instead. It’s not a good idea to re-implement a function which already has a great implementation…
If we’re talking about a great implementation of the feature, it would be ‘Sidebery’.
I don’t think Sidebery is a great implementation unless the developers fix this bug. It can be reproduced stably and is important for users who opened many tabs and keep them between session.
I migrated from Edge for the last time to avoid Manifest v4, I’ve been missing vertical tabs a lot. Sidebery just didn’t work for me. I really like how this is looking.
Edge mentioned on this sub? Brave.
Oh I don’t even use Linux lol, this is the first post I found on this news
No, Edge.
I’m using vertical tabs since 4 years ago and to do so installed Tree Style Tab (https://tinyurl.com/y5gr4dyn)
Also has to disable horizontal tabs create or update the file
chrome/userChrome.csslocated at your profile with#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse; }and add the setting
toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheetswith valuetrue(use about:config)Wake me up when we have Chrome-style tab groups in FF.
I don’t get their allure. Why not Tree Style Tabs? You can create “groups” and endless subgroups. Also, no need to scroll horizontally, which takes way longer to find stuff, just scroll vertically or collapse trees.
Tab groups seem inferior to tree style tabs.
I’m not sure if it’s the same, but floorp has Workspaces which I find very useful
No, I mean Chrome-style tab groups. Existing FF add-ons are okay, but nowhere near as nice as in Chrome.
I use Edge on my work computer since I can log into it with enterprise SSO and store my passwords and bookmarks to my work account. Not ideal, but I don’t do anything personal on my work computer because I already have zero expectation of privacy on it anyway.
Vertical Tabs are an absolute game-changer, especially combined with tab groups. I can actually juggle hundreds of tabs in a single browser window without issue. It’s the only thing I can say that Edge got right.
I’ve been waiting for this development for a long time. I can’t wait to have this functionality on my personal computer, on a privacy-respecting FOSS browser no less. The extensions currently available for this are just not that great, it has to be a native feature.
Ff with sidebery is pretty amazing. Although, it’s annoying you need to add a CSS file to disable regular tabs.
I have a CSS file anyways to make look the giant buttons like actual tabs.
Hundreds? Why? I never have more than like ten, and each time I open my browser I start with none
Not the person you replied to, but I can help with an example:
- I have the browser reopen the tabs I had open last time, but keeps unloaded until I click on them.
- The tabs are in a tree hierarchy, meaning I can collapse an entire group while keeping them all open.
- My work involves juggling up to 50 different accounts each for a hand full of websites, so containers allow me to quickly swap between accounts signed into the same page.
Fair points, though what advantage does keeping unloaded tabs serve over using bookmarks?
When you’re keeping things in a tree structure for visual grouping and using containers to manage different logins, bookmarks will lose the tree structure, and you’ll have to specify which container to open it in. If your workflow involves a dozen tabs per context, locating the bookmarks and reopening them every time you switch contexts is a significant time and productivity loss.
Consider the classic Evidence Board (also known as string wall, crazy wall, conspiracy board, etc.). Saving everything to bookmarks is the equivalent of putting your board’s contents into a drawer, then pinning everything back up whenever you need to look at or update that particular conspiracy. It works, but it’s cumbersome, error-prone, and wastes a lot of time; you’d only do this if you only have one board but multiple things to inspect. Leaving tabs open and simply unloading the inactive tab trees is like having multiple separate boards where you just roll them into a closet when you aren’t using them.
What are these tab trees? Is that an addon?
There are several addons that organize the tabs in the sidebar with a vertical, tree-style layout, with nested tabs that can be collapsed, just like a classic folder structure. This is what GreyBeard was referring to earlier in the thread when he said “The tabs are in a tree hierarchy”.
Tree Style Tab has been around since 2007; Sidebery is much newer, and IMO looks and performs better.
You are correct, TreestyleTabs was my jam for years, but I have moved over to Sidebery because it performs better and has better support for containers, as well as being considerably more customizable.
My work involves juggling up to 50 different accounts each for a hand full of websites, so containers allow me to quickly swap between accounts signed into the same page.
So like astroturfing?
Not at all. Just managing clients stuff on portals that don’t allow for delegated access to a single account.
I’ve had the Tree Style Tabs extension for almost 10 years now, I can’t imagine any other way of browsing.
I completely hid my tabs with custom css and I’ll never go back. With something like vimium-c you can switch tabs with vim-like bindings and an fzf-like menu. If you have lots of tabs, the fzf way is way faster to pick out a specific tab than it is to look for it in a tab row (or column). If you have few tabs, you don’t even need to see them to know where they are. I’m being very serious. Tabs are bloat. I recommend trying it out if it is something for you.
(edit) On top of that, it looks so clean. You get a bit more space for the actual content (I also hide my url bar, it pops up when you use it). It fits right in with a keyboard focus workflow, you get consistent keybindings across vim and your browser (I use the same keybinds for switching buffers in vim so it feels the same).
Downvotes with no replies explaining why? This is happening a lot.
I use qutebrowser and still show tabs, but this is a very interesting approach. Thanks for the rec.
Qutebrowser is very cool! Personally I want to use firefox’s engine (or at least not something chromium based). Otherwise I would have jumped ship to qute or surf already. Currently my only gripe is that the plugin doesn’t work on pdf’s and other special pages, which is not an issue on qute.
Pretty sure it was just emacs users instinctively swatting the vim enthusiast.
Crazy that you are getting hate for this perfectly reasonable and well-expressed opinion. No counter-arguments, just “muh i no like muh go away”.
Apparently this place is not so different from the R-site at all.
I’ve been using a plugin for vertical tabs, but a native implementation would be nice
This feels like something that should be a extension
I don’t think extensions as they are now will be able to do everything this can do. Specifically modifying the userChrome.css. Yes, there are existing vertical tab extensions, but they just reuse the existing sidebar used for the bookmarks and history. Nothing quite up to the quality that Edge or Vivaldi have.
Do you use vertical tabs? If so, why?
I’m not the parent commenter, and I don’t use it, but if you have a lot of tabs, it’s easier to navigate between them in a vertical list if you are used to looking at the tab titles to decide which one you need.
This is partly because the tab items get very narrow when there is a lot, but also because in a vertical list there’s just a lot more room for them. The top bar is ok when you know the tab you need by it’s shortened title or position, but a vertical list is better when you don’t and you need to search for it by it’s full title or when it’s further away.Maybe I should use it too.
I agree that userChrome.css must be modified, but once it is, Firefox is way better for vertical tabs. When you mix in the tree style that is common in the extensions and containers, there is nothing that competes, especially if you work involves managing a large number of accounts for the same few websites, as mine does. It is not uncommon for me to have 10-20 active tabs, and 80+ inactive tabs at any given time. Horizontal tabs can’t compete, and the flat nature of the tabs in Edge certainly turn into a mess quickly.
So what you’re saying is vertical tabs and tab groups are the perfect combination.
I used to use Chrome at work. When Edge added vertical tabs I jumped to that immediately.
Now that IT is allowing FireFox I switched to that with Tree Style Tabs. I am missing the tab groups from Edge, but the tree is worth it.
Yes tree tabs with groups would indeed be perfect.
I was just today trying FF again and discovered vertical tabs was via extension only and holy shit disabling the tabs up top looked like a bit of work. Native vertical tabs and grouping and I’m back. It should just copy the layout that Edge does.
It’s not too bad, you change legacy style sheets to true in about:config then put a userChrome.css file in a .mozilla/randomprofilename-default/chrome folder. A lot nicer hiding normal tabs though, I constantly F1 my tab bar anyways:
I can second that I need to F1 regularly in Fx to fore that sidebar to rerender. I’ll get weird bugs with the pinned tab row.
Never saw the appeal in vertical tabs, but maybe Edge or FF extensions just don’t do them well enough… Good for Mozilla though, I guess
For 16:9 (ish) displays you have more pixels left to right than up and down, it makes sense to use up your horizontal space first when placing permanent UI elements on your screen. Still up to preference though.
Agree… Too much screen real estate horizontally, not enough vertically
Especially with the gigantic tab buttons the browser uses by default even in “compact” mode.
To think that I have lived years without knowing about those little features like combining title and menu bar to save space
The real crime here is the death of full screen monitors. Full screen just works so well for Internet browsing and programming. The switch to widescreen became common because games and movies were becoming more widescreen and that caused them to look smaller on full screen monitors. These days, the problem can be solved by getting extra large full screen monitors. Back then, that was not financially feasible.
A lot of websites are optimized for reading at around 1024 pixel which means many sites just give you the void to look at on both sides of a centered site (worse in naïvely scaling up all UI to the max so widscreen monitors get billboard-sized text)—so you may as well have more vertical reading space. The other part has to deal with keeping the titles readable with several open as the Latin script is horizontal. Either the titles disappear & you are left with tolerate logo favicons like Chromium or like Fx where the tabs move to vertical scrolling which is difficult to parse quickly—there’s a reason why you write your grocery list with a newline as a separator than trying to cram it all on a single line. Given the current Fx implementations using the sidebar are kind of a hack, I for one am happy to see this finally being worked on.
anyone else feel like a lot of these firefox updates recently are just them implementing the most popular extensions from firefox 3.6?
It’s always been like this. Aside from Gecko and/or security updates that’s how all browser development has functioned since add-ons became a thing.
FINALLY
I tried so hard to get used to vertical tabs, and failed miserably. I just can’t like them. Lol
