[HN Gopher] Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out
___________________________________________________________________
Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out
Author : ReadCarlBarks
Score : 401 points
Date : 2024-08-08 14:46 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.nightly.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.nightly.mozilla.org)
| phartenfeller wrote:
| A screenshot of how it looks would have been helpful. I guess
| this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/
| gkoberger wrote:
| Maybe (probably?), but back when I worked at Mozilla in ~2010
| "Tree Style Tabs" was one of the most popular add-ons.
|
| Here's a screenshot of what the feature looks like:
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2024/06/25/you-can-try-vertical-tabs-...
| tapoxi wrote:
| 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.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| 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.
| gkoberger wrote:
| 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)
| reginald78 wrote:
| 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.
| pantulis wrote:
| 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.
|
| Kudos to the Firefox team.
| doix wrote:
| > 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.
| johnmaguire wrote:
| AFAIK, Tree Style Tab still exists?
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
| ta...
| rkangel wrote:
| 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.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
| thro1 wrote:
| > the plugin system is very rich
|
| - 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.
| wtcactus wrote:
| Arc is much more than that, though.
|
| 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.
| Vinnl wrote:
| 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.
| Y_Y wrote:
| 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.
| causal wrote:
| Hadn't heard of Arc, went to download it just now, and...it
| requires an account to use? Really?
|
| Browser UIs have barely evolved in the past decade so I guess
| I'm excited that Firefox is trying something new.
| thisisabore wrote:
| 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.
| abhinavk wrote:
| Edge and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality
| before Arc even existed.
|
| Firefox also had it via an extension.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| >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.
| osbulbul wrote:
| 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.
|
| So we are lonely in the dark :)
| sccxy wrote:
| Edge is stable and has vertical tabs and split view support.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Dude, I cannot use a Microsoft product even if it has the
| functionality I prefer.
| Scharkenberg wrote:
| Well, that's your problem, dude. :)
| ss48 wrote:
| You could check out Vivaldi. The split view is pretty robust.
| The Vertical tabs can be on left or right, and allow one level
| of tab grouping.
| osbulbul wrote:
| I think I only didn't try Vivaldi :) thanks, I will
| definitely look
| dustincoates wrote:
| 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.
| eviks wrote:
| Yeah, performance is its biggest downside.
|
| Is it slow with a fresh profile? It can become suprisingly
| slow as session files grow, but cleaning it can revert some
| of that
| ss48 wrote:
| Yeah. I found out that a Tabs > Memory Saver setting was
| disabled. Once I enabled that, the performance improved
| somewhat.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| 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.
| wasteduniverse wrote:
| Being forced to use Edge on my work laptop is how I found out
| about vertical tabs, they're so much easier to use for me.
|
| Why is having a vertical option for the taskbar not on Win11?
| That sounds like one of the easiest features to port over.
| pantulis wrote:
| 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.
| generalizations wrote:
| 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.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| freediver wrote:
| Orion browser does, all natively.
| osbulbul wrote:
| 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
| diggan wrote:
| > 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?
| jwells89 wrote:
| Linux WebKit browsers are pretty snappy too. I think it
| just boils down to what each browser/engine team
| prioritizes.
| reginald78 wrote:
| IIRC very early versions of Chrome actually had native
| vertical tabs and then they removed the feature at some
| point.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| > I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and
| split view.
|
| I wish UI toolkits just came fully loaded and let me spin views
| and panels and anything in any which way I liked.
| FlamingMoe wrote:
| Brave has vertical tabs, and a helpful grouping feature. Highly
| recommend.
| psygn89 wrote:
| 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.
| dustincoates wrote:
| > 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.)
| osbulbul wrote:
| 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.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| ???
|
| 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?
| bloopernova wrote:
| Not in the developer/beta edition yet.
|
| 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 ;)
| quibono wrote:
| Just my personal 2c.
|
| 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| Tab Groups is another feature that FF recently prioritized in
| their roadmap. I would expect it to be integrated with this
| feature.
| philipov wrote:
| How do you nest one tab under another? If you can't, I'll keep
| using the Tree Style Tab extension instead.
| pantulis wrote:
| It does not seem to be currently possible. I guess they are
| working on it, this is just a first step.
| mpawelski wrote:
| 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.
| BadHumans wrote:
| 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.
| KaiMagnus wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1emmfvb/ive_just_f...
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| lofenfew wrote:
| The truly unfortunate thing is that it was the perfect such
| platform, then they took it away in the name of security.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| 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.
| buo wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
| sigio wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| diggan wrote:
| I'm well aware of what NoScript does, I'm already using
| it. It seems you're missing the point of the comparison.
| Groxx wrote:
| 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.
| muwtyhg wrote:
| Another former Tree Style Tabs user, now on Sideberry with no
| regrets.
|
| 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.
| mikae1 wrote:
| Looks like we won't have nesting in Firefox's
| implementation which made it kinda pointless to me.
| adhamsalama wrote:
| Sidebery is amazing. I have been using it for more than a
| year now and I love it.
| thisisabore wrote:
| Started using Sideberry over a year ago and have not looked
| back since. Very good stuff.
| Izkata wrote:
| 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?
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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.
| buo wrote:
| I have 20 panes and it works fine.
| FuturisticGoo wrote:
| > ... 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.
|
| I do agree that this needs a better UI
| sigio wrote:
| 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
| burkaman wrote:
| 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.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| > Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated
|
| How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| elchangri wrote:
| It's called "Tab Containers" and Firefox was the first
| browser to have the feature
| JasonSage wrote:
| Parent is talking about Tab Groups, not Tab Containers.
| DrammBA wrote:
| Can those "tab containers" be collapsed into 1 "fake" tab
| with the container name and uncollapsed back into full tabs
| by clicking on that "fake" tab?
| emaro wrote:
| Containers separate context for the websites, e.g. you can
| log in to the same site with different account at the same
| time.
|
| 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.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| They have tab containers though.
| misswaterfairy wrote:
| http://archive.is/uzj4z
| worble wrote:
| > 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".
| persnickety wrote:
| 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.
| akkartik wrote:
| > 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.
| persnickety wrote:
| I'm using Firefox.
|
| 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.
| akkartik wrote:
| 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.
| persnickety wrote:
| 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.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| 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.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't
| think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI.
|
| True. I avoid the 2 largest chromium browsers because their
| innovations have a goal of exploiting end users.
| eviks wrote:
| Maintaining your UI and being able to tweak it to your liking
| is exactly the part of "UI innovation" where Firefox is
| severely lacking
|
| And there is nothing dependable about you failure to do
| something for many years because the UI is stable in not
| supporting it
| babypuncher wrote:
| 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.
| JohnFen wrote:
| 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.
| godelski wrote:
| 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.
|
| [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-...
| clumsysmurf wrote:
| I'm in the group that uses multiple browsers. Its hard going
| between Safari and Firefox:
|
| * 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.
| attendant3446 wrote:
| 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.
| dizhn wrote:
| After a certain number Chromium based browsers stop showing
| the new tabs.
| krzyk wrote:
| 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.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| They're working on a profile switcher:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-
| re...
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Can't you change the user profile in the command line with
| a flag? Surprised it takes this long to implement that in a
| gui fashion.
| fabrice_d wrote:
| There's already a GUI (launch firefox with the
| --profileManager command line flag), but it's very
| barebone.
| morsch wrote:
| This flag and the UI seems to go back to (at least)
| Netscape 7 in 2002, btw.
| Vinnl wrote:
| And also about:profiles, with the same caveat.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| You can open different profiles by typing about:profiles
| into the address bar.
|
| https://support.mozilla.org/kb/profile-manager-create-
| remove...
| mpeg wrote:
| 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)
| attendant3446 wrote:
| 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.
| bilkow wrote:
| 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.
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Waterfox has vertical tabs
| stemlord wrote:
| Great now they just need to add back a dedicated grab-zone
| along the top of the window
| Vinnl wrote:
| Right click on the empty area next to the address bar, click
| "Customise Toolbar...", then in the bottom left-hand corner
| you can toggle the Title Bar.
| eviks wrote:
| Vivaldi is very far ahead, and it has vertical tabs, not sure
| how Chrome is the only comparator for a niche browser
| supriyo-biswas wrote:
| The current implementation still leaves in the tab bar at the
| top at least on Macs. I hope they iron these bugs out before
| their stable release.
| Vinnl wrote:
| The bottom button in the sidebar ("Customize sidebar") allows
| you to turn off the tab bar at the top.
| jorvi wrote:
| > 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.
| encom wrote:
| 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.
| mchem wrote:
| 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
| wenc wrote:
| Naive question, why are vertical tabs in the sidebar desirable?
|
| I tried TST once but didn't get why they were bettter than
| horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.
| knallfrosch wrote:
| 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.
| jwells89 wrote:
| 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.
| McScrooge wrote:
| 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.
| psygn89 wrote:
| You'll find it's usefulness relative to the width/resolution of
| your screen and the amount of tabs you tend to have open at
| once.
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| 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.
| iamtedd wrote:
| 6. It's the only alternative if you want to keep UI elements
| out of your title bar.
| eviks wrote:
| 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
| nixosbestos wrote:
| 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?
| PetitPrince wrote:
| 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
| ?
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| They've already added a toggle to disable horizontal tabs.
| slightwinder wrote:
| 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?
| metalliqaz wrote:
| I've been using TreeStyleTab for a long time. Interested to see
| if this will make it obsolete.
| zzzbra wrote:
| And not a single screenshot was provided.
| hamdouni wrote:
| I like minimalism so I made ZenFox (an ArcFox extension fork) and
| it uses vertical tabs. Maybe time to rework it to use this
| instead !
| causal wrote:
| 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.
| born-jre wrote:
| no tree mode, but good start
| TechPlasma wrote:
| I just really want Tab Groups.
|
| This is a nice step forward.
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| hamdouni wrote:
| 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 !
| petabit wrote:
| Native vim integration
| ochronus wrote:
| Yay, finally! It's not there yet in terms of functionality, but
| it's a step in the right direction.
| kmfrk wrote:
| If you have the Container Tabs add-on, you can also pull up a
| basic tab sidebar with F2 until this is released in the main
| version.
| qwerty456127 wrote:
| 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.
| nullhole wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/its-a-new-
| firef...
| jermeh wrote:
| Arc browser does this, you should check that out
| thomasahle wrote:
| And it also as vertical tabs! Just checked out Arc. Very
| innovative design. I guess it's inspired by mobile browsers.
| int32 wrote:
| 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.
| _thisdot wrote:
| 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
| encom wrote:
| Haha, Arc requires an account to use, wtf?
| FireInsight wrote:
| 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.
| jakewins wrote:
| 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.
|
| i3 to the rescue!
| codazoda wrote:
| 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.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| I use yabai on Mac, coming from AwesomeWM on Linux. Never
| tried Rectangle, any idea how it compares?
| TylerE wrote:
| It's not a window manager, but a tool for doing various
| things to windows triggered by hotkeys.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| 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.
| thomasahle wrote:
| The cat was out of the bag, when browsers got tabs. They are
| already tiny window managers, and may as well lean into it.
| kbrosnan wrote:
| 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.
| sureIy wrote:
| No they're not.
|
| 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.
| rpncreator wrote:
| 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.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| Why not just do that with your window manager??
| husam212 wrote:
| Floorp, a Firefox fork, has this feature.
| rxyz wrote:
| Try Vivaldi, it has something like that
| pests wrote:
| Yep, can tile as many sites as you want inside one tab.
| AzzyHN wrote:
| Edge has this, though I have no idea why you wouldn't just open
| a second window...
| Numerlor wrote:
| The mode that opens all links from one pane in the other pane
| is useful at times, and wouldn't really be achievable with
| just separate windows
| kreyenborgi wrote:
| 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.
| raffraffraff wrote:
| yeah, this with a tiling window manager is my go to.
| bloopernova wrote:
| Yeah, widescreen monitors lend themselves nicely to a split
| pane view and I wish more applications used it.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| You can support feature requests on Mozilla Connect:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab...
| int32 wrote:
| The Arc browser (macOS and Windows) has exactly that feature
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| stavros wrote:
| Vivaldi does this also.
| ainiriand wrote:
| You can try Arc, it does that.
| komali2 wrote:
| 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.
| hacker_88 wrote:
| Vivaldi has that . Helpful for comparison, charts etc
| thro1 wrote:
| Very simple in Firefox (tested in Firefox 60.4.0.esr - any
| later check
| _toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets_ etc.):
|
| - use userChrome.css to display ALL tabs side by side:
|
| _profile /chrome/userChrome.css : tabpanels {
| display: -moz-box !important; } tabpanels >
| notificationbox { -moz-box-flex: 1; border-
| width: 2px !important; border:solid #888; }
|
| _
|
| - 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). : _)_
| thanzex wrote:
| Edge does that
| Izkata wrote:
| 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.
|
| We lost a lot when they abandoned that.
| qainsights wrote:
| Great. All I need a native split screen just like in Edge in FF.
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab...
| Retr0id wrote:
| I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I
| went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal
| tab space is pretty close to the _actual_ number of things I can
| usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my
| reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
|
| I was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory
| and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in
| terms of focus.
|
| Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs
| in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).
|
| I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful"
| browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick
| queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless"
| session, with the understanding that I can close any of these
| tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing
| anything important. If I do come across something important, it
| gets noted down elsewhere.
| hbn wrote:
| Yeah, I gave an honest shot at using vertical tabs for a few
| months because it frankly does seem like a more logical use of
| screen real estate. Web pages don't tend to take up much
| horizontal space, so you might as well put a bigger list of
| tabs there where they can all show more text.
|
| For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-
| switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and
| right. And all my other apps with tabs still use horizontal
| tabs, so I couldn't fully switch over to that model in my head.
| Additionally the URL is still at the top so it was more work to
| glance back and forth between the left of my browser for the
| tab and the URL at the top which in my mind are more "closely
| linked" for that to make sense.
|
| But you also highlighted a good point, the limited space of
| traditional tabs does keep my organization in check. Once I get
| around the 20-tab mark and I'm unable to see any text beyond
| the website's favicon, I start feeling dirty and it gives me
| some incentive to clean up.
| PcChip wrote:
| >I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to
| clean up.
|
| I wish I had your discipline, I just open new browser windows
| and start more tabs there
| JasonSage wrote:
| I think vertical tabs has the exact same effect of being
| artificially space limiting if that's valuable to you,
| without the amount of visible text changing every single time
| you open or close a tab.
|
| I tend to sit with 20-40 tabs open, which is in the vicinity
| of how many a vertical tab list can accommodate comfortably,
| but I get about 4 letters per tab. If I needed to be able to
| see the text, I'd have to cap a window out at maybe 8 tabs,
| which is just unreasonable for some workflows.
| filcuk wrote:
| I love using Sidebery, because I can define a container profile
| for each group of tabs, which is then applied automatically for
| new tabs.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| I switched to Sidebery from TreeStyleTabs and I much prefer
| it. Tab groups are great as I can separate different styles
| of browsing such as news browsing or work etc.
| Eridrus wrote:
| I feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just
| a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real
| estate.
|
| These days I want to split my window in half and have two
| windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.
|
| In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs,
| previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with
| Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I do this with my browser windows but just open the treestyle
| tab menu with f1. You only need it when you need it anyhow.
| JasonSage wrote:
| > In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs,
| previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with
| Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.
|
| Firefox has multiple ways you can do the tab search.
|
| - Firefox View is an icon originally configured at the front
| of the tab bar that takes you to a dedicated page listing
| your tabs, recently visited, and lets you search tabs and
| otherwise manage them.
|
| - Firefox has a tab search built into the address bar as soon
| as you enter the character '%' followed by a space. So for
| two sets of two keystrokes you're doing tab search: `Ctrl<L>
| + '% '`.
|
| IMO the latter especially is fast and easy enough that I
| don't miss Chrome's tab search, and I often go into Firefox
| View just to see what I've got open and trim it down.
| nirvdrum wrote:
| The ancestry information in Tree Style Tabs (and also with
| Orion's built-in vertical tabs) is an undersold feature, I
| think. Edge has vertical tabs and they're not terribly
| useful. You get a constant-sized click target, which is a
| huge UX bump over Chrome's shrinking targets, but having
| trees of tabs is amazingly useful for organization.
|
| I hadn't really thought about the side-by-side window thing,
| though, so I'll keep that in mind when debating vertical
| tabs. I usually run with a multi-monitor and while I do side-
| by-side with i3, that's on a large monitor so screen real
| estate isn't a problem.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but
| instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and
| generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs
| that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a
| given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.
|
| I personally use them so I can context switch between projects.
| I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for
| project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day
| stuff, one for reading material, one for conference
| talks/background noise, etc.
|
| Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it
| without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that
| window (or a different window) later when I need it again.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...
| bityard wrote:
| Vivaldi has this built-in, they call it Workspaces. It's the
| #1 thing I like about the browser.
|
| Firefox had this to back in ancient times, it was called Tab
| Candy, Panorama, or tab groups, depending on the release
| number. Then they killed it because "nobody used it."
| godelski wrote:
| I use this and love it. One of the most useful adons. Really
| helps me to differentiate work mode form non work mode. I do
| wish it was built in because it appears to do it a hacky way
| by using bookmarks. Which is fine, because you can think of
| these tabs like temporary bookmarks.
|
| Usually how I do it is at my office desk I have a second
| monitor I hook my laptop up to. So I open a new window, let
| that be the group, and then I use my mac for the terminal and
| my ipad sits to the side with spotify and any chat apps, out
| of the way and easy to dismiss.
|
| What's extra satisfying is I'm a tab hoarder. But you finish
| a project and get to see all those tabs go away.
| jamwil wrote:
| Safari has this now too. It's actually a pretty good browser
| these days.
| krzyk wrote:
| Unfortunately it doesn't work for pinned tabs - I use them
| for pages that I want to keep for longer and remember about
| them. Bookmarks are used for something that I store and go
| back to it seldom (e.g. when I store a recipe).
| rimunroe wrote:
| > I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I
| went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal
| tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can
| usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is
| my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.
|
| I followed the same trajectory. I now keep one window for more
| stable things that will be left open for a while (calendar,
| email, some long-lived task) and another for stuff I'm actively
| working on (the app I'm developing, docs for some API, etc). If
| I go over more than two windows with ~6 tabs each I just start
| closing things because I've almost certainly gone past the
| point of needing some of those tabs and if I need to get back
| to them it's usually faster to just retrace the steps I took to
| get to them in the first place or search in my history.
| nine_k wrote:
| I actively use tree style tabs, and have dozens to hundreds.
| With auto tab discard, it's not taxing.
|
| This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a
| project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured,
| but are much more high-ceremony to create.
|
| To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you
| don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree
| likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore.
| When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.
|
| If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of
| history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so
| that you can track, from which page did you open this link,
| what links did you open on this page, etc.
| waveBidder wrote:
| I do this too; have you found effective ways to tell firefox
| to maybe chill on eating all memory? I find if I don't
| restart ~1/week, it will end up reserving ~32GB of RAM for
| itself, which is just absurd.
| nine_k wrote:
| Of course, else it would be unmanageable.
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-tab-
| disc...
|
| I tell it to never discard certain tabs, like gmail or
| snack or calendar. Also in some situations it's very
| convenient to ask it to discard tabs in all other windows,
| or all tabs but the current one. Otherwise it just discards
| tabs after some time of inactivity.
|
| It integrates with TST and can operate in terms of
| subtrees.
| the_pwner224 wrote:
| I tried the auto tab discard extension but it didn't help
| for me. I occasionally force kill FF and have it recover
| the previous session when it starts up again. Same thing to
| not lose state when rebooting my computer.
| throwaway37124 wrote:
| Try disabling accessibility services. (about:config ->
| accessibility.force_disabled)
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1726887
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1907929
| II2II wrote:
| > To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one.
|
| Different people have different needs, so it is useful to
| distinguish between the two. For example: I have groups of
| bookmarks that I like to open as tabs in a separate window.
| If I only need them once a week, I want to close the window
| when I am done and pull them up again when they are needed.
| Fishing them out of a history of all of my browsing is
| something that I don't want to endure (even if they are
| stored in the history as a group).
|
| Other people have other needs. Some only want an extremely
| limited number of tabs open at one time (presumably to help
| them focus).
| JohnFen wrote:
| > Different people have different needs, so it is useful to
| distinguish between the two.
|
| I agree entirely. I don't use the bookmark facilities in
| the browser at all, because I prefer using separate a
| bookmark server that I run. That way my bookmarks are
| available from any machine using any browser that happens
| to be available.
|
| But I do use tabs. Not to the extent that they need
| management, though -- I rarely have more than two or three
| going at a time[1]. Combining bookmarks and tabs implies
| the addition of complexity that wouldn't benefit me, so I'd
| prefer not to have it.
|
| [1] If I'm doing something where I need to have many sites
| open at a time, meaning research, I prefer to have multiple
| browser instances to organize things, because then I can
| have multiple pages visible simultaneously and can use the
| DE to organize things at a higher level.
| wonger_ wrote:
| What do you use for a bookmark server?
| Retr0id wrote:
| > tabs and bookmarks should meld into one
|
| I can see the appeal of this, and more broadly, not having to
| think about tab management. But for me, I find I actively
| benefit from the process of deciding what to keep around.
| nine_k wrote:
| Certainly, you should keep this ability. Close it to not
| keep around :) Hiding stuff by subtree is not really
| flexible, I realize, and won't match everyone's tastes
| equally. Synching tabs and bookmarks could be a
| configurable option.
|
| I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also
| needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches
| using %s?
| entropie wrote:
| > I realize that traditional explicit bookmarks are also
| needed; where else can I easily put arbitrary searches
| using %s?
|
| I outsourced that. Since I have seen leah2's anarchaias
| [1] tumblelog (and one of its successors project.ioni.st
| from the rails guys, I fail to find a snapshot online -
| it was pretty) I iterated through multiple software
| solutions. My bookmark manager is also a tumblog [2] and
| online accessible.
|
| I would quickly get to overwhelmed by to many bookmarks
| and the lack of (plattform independent) organisation
| tools. I have a bookmarklet that adds the current site as
| entry (non puplic, and I edit it later (or delete)). It
| also mirrors and downloads stuff (images, reddit videos,
| etc).
|
| 1. https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/
|
| 2. https://wecoso.de/bloogmarks
| nixass wrote:
| It really depends on your workflows. I dread tree style on work
| laptop as I go through tickets a lot, and only what matters to
| me is last 4 digits out of 10 the tickets have. If I use
| horizontal tabs second half of tab name is truncated but
| opposite on tree styled ones
| __david__ wrote:
| You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main
| window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_).
| But that many tabs can only happen with a vertical tab-bar. I
| started with tree-style tabs but I'm now using "Sideberry"
| which seems to be a little nicer.
| rimunroe wrote:
| > You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my
| main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a
| bit_).
|
| People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't
| always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an
| unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been
| diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12
| tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close
| attention to organization and establishing routines to cut
| down on distractions and reduce the possibility of variation
| in daily activities are _very_ common coping strategies.
| Izkata wrote:
| > People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term)
|
| The old naming scheme made more sense than the current one.
| Under the current definition there are three types of ADHD,
| of which the "inattentive" type used to be called ADD
| because it doesn't have the "hyperactivity" trademark. So
| for that type "ADHD" is a misnomer that causes people to
| not even consider they may have it.
| rimunroe wrote:
| That's a fair point and I'm probably just being overly
| touchy. I have ADHD-C and (perhaps unsurprisingly) favor
| ADHD-* nomenclature for distinguishing inside the
| umbrella. I think a large part of my aversion to "ADD" is
| because in the past I've mostly heard it used by people
| who saying they're "so ADD" when describing normal
| behavior (the same way people refer to being "OCD about
| X").
| dotancohen wrote:
| I'm on 1018 right now, I think you're the first person I've
| ever seen with more open tabs than me ))
|
| I've actually been working hard to have less open tabs
| every evening than what I had when I started work. Maybe in
| 1018 day I'll close that last tab. And yes, there is a
| reason that every single one of them is open.
| Arelius wrote:
| I assure you, that many tabs can certainly happen with the
| standard horizontal tab bar..
|
| I have a similar amount regularly, and have never tried
| vertical tabs. I did recently start using all tabs helper
| though.
| user_7832 wrote:
| Hey fellow tab hoarder! I "only" have 744 tabs open right now
| (in Edge). Though chrome, firefox, brave, arc, and supermium
| have a few hundred each... (they've been force closed by task
| manager so my laptop still technically runs haha).
|
| It's funny finding fellow tab hoarders online, people rarely
| hit the thousands - you're pretty much the first person I've
| encountered who's got more tabs open than me.
|
| Btw what's your PC specs? I'm using a Framework 13 (7840u,
| 32gb ram) and am currently at 56% RAM usage. I find a fairly
| big difference when I'm connected to power and when I'm not,
| for some reason.
| __david__ wrote:
| I've got a recent macbook. I use Firefox which lazily load
| tabs which makes it fairly efficient. I also use "Auto Tab
| Discard" so tabs unload quickly to keep memory down long
| term. My Firefox is currently using 6GB of RAM. For
| comparison I also have Chrome open with about 15 tabs and
| it's taking 4GB.
| PawgerZ wrote:
| Fellow tab hoarder here (though I pale in comparison to your
| 2630). I had the exact same experience starting with tree
| style tabs and switching to sideberry. Very comparable, but I
| agree that Sideberry feels a bit nicer, and it has wicked
| customizability settings.
| delecti wrote:
| I've got ADHD and work hard to keep my tabs under control. As
| soon as they get too small to read (at least part of) the
| title, I lose the ability to keep track of what I've got
| open, so there's no value in keeping them open. That
| threshold is about 20 tabs per window, and at most about 4
| windows, and ideally closer to 5 tabs each in 2 windows, when
| things are under control.
| eviks wrote:
| This is a failure of the browser setup if you have to resort to
| a text file for tabs
|
| Also don't get the benefit of the stateless session as a
| private window - you can just as well close a regular second
| browser window and not look back at history?
| Retr0id wrote:
| I don't use a text file for tabs, I use a text file for
| taking notes.
|
| The fact that the second window is private isn't hugely
| relevant, it just helps to stop me from accidentally doing
| stateful things in it (and reduces cross-site tracking in the
| process). The point is that I _never_ have to ask "is this
| tab important?", the decision was already made up-front,
| based on where I opened the tab in the first place.
| somishere wrote:
| I put together a simple TST hack / extension that puts recently
| active tabs in the horizontal space (with a "user-defined"
| timeout). Have been using it actively for the last few years.
|
| https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/6813b2c27611be03...
|
| It's nowhere near perfect (see comments in the gist), but I
| genuinely enjoy the paradigm of easy access active tabs
| alongside a full laundry list. I find myself reinstalling it on
| new machines as I go. It's also just a few lines of CSS.
|
| That said, keen to try out the nightly version of vertical
| tabs. Tho I'm hoping my active tabs hack might work with it
| too.
| dymk wrote:
| Why does an announcement like this not have a screenshot of the
| feature?
| whycome wrote:
| Such a glaring oversight that I'm actually wondering if it was
| intentional. Causes engagement/sharing/spreading of other
| associated commentary/links on the release?
| codazoda wrote:
| I wish that blog post showed a screenshot of these features so
| that I didn't have to go download the nightly just to see what
| they look like.
| codazoda wrote:
| Another user pointed to this screenshot on reddit.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1emmfvb/ive_just_f...
| sunaookami wrote:
| That's modified with a userChrome.css
| dietr1ch wrote:
| Nice to see this finally come up, but it's going to take a while
| until it catches up with Sidebery or even TST
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| One thing I like from Tree Tabs that others usually don't is
| folders. I find it useful to group and collapse them as needed.
| Hopefully they'll add that.
| rpozarickij wrote:
| I've just updated my Firefox and I got the options in
| about:config to enable vertical tabs.
|
| sidebar.revamp and sidebar.verticalTabs need to be set to true.
| ant6n wrote:
| How about a screenshot.
| butz wrote:
| What I find interesting, and hoping it will be integrated in
| future releases - easy feature toggling from Settings page.
| Firefox, please, allow me to turn off all the features that I do
| not use or do not want to clutter my toolbars with. I'll be happy
| with "opt-out" variant here, but my selected preference must
| stick and not be reset on next update.
| autoexec wrote:
| I never cared about vertical tabs, but I know that this is
| something that many people have wanted for a very long time. How
| long has this been actively in the works? Is it just a
| coincidence that this finally got done only after all the
| negative press Firefox got following their pivot to becoming an
| AdTech company which generates revenue through the constant
| surveillance of its users?
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| The meta bug was created 3 months ago:
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894060
| emsign wrote:
| I wish Firefox was like Vivaldi so I can switch from the Chrome
| based browser.
| edallme wrote:
| I wish it supported using the mouse wheel to move between tabs,
| like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-
| ta...
| stiltzkin wrote:
| I remember old Opera had a sidebar and vertical tabs (same as
| current Vivaldi). Opera was always way ahead of UX of all
| browsers.
| sunaookami wrote:
| I still miss Opera Presto. It was so ahead of everyone and
| after 10 years no other browser can compete with it (UI-wise).
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| How about an option to disable tabs altogether and use a "one-
| tab-window" instead? Like we used to have before. I already have
| a WM able to handle this. I don't need another level of window
| management with its own logic and shortcuts.
| nattaylor wrote:
| On Chrome, I solve my too-many-tab issues with an extension [0]
| that closes the LRU tab once a threshold is reached (10 for me).
| I find the tabs I need are open and wide enough, and the tabs
| that autoclose were not useful anymore. About once a month I'm
| doing a research task where I actually want many tabs and I turn
| it off temporarily.
|
| [0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/max-
| tabs/ghhcibaghj...
| ReadCarlBarks wrote:
| Firefox equivalents:
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/auto-close-tabs/
|
| https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/limit-active-tabs/
| whycome wrote:
| Cool. But dammit why aren't tabs more modifiable. I want to
| rename them. I want to assign an icon. I am okay if a tab takes
| up two vertical lines to make it entirely readable. There was an
| element of something really useful in MS 'Metro' UI -- just the
| fact that there could be variations in size of target/icon/links.
| I currently 'pin' my mail and notes tab. These exist as specific
| functional tabs -- let me style them a bit differently or
| something.
| crossroadsguy wrote:
| Someone who had once reached maybe regular 3 digit number of tabs
| to barely 10 often I now understand that browser and tab power-
| use is having as few tabs possible. It's like Inbox Zero thing
| for me, minus the fad angle.
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Tab Mix Plus remains unsurpassed.
| dsp_person wrote:
| On version 129 I've been playing with the CSS to make the tabs
| wider and thinner. Because of some code in tabbrowser.js I
| couldn't work around with css, it needs
| user_pref("ui.prefersReducedMotion", 1) for changing max width to
| not break tab closing.
|
| https://gist.github.com/digitalsignalperson/7e5d4a44fbd7427a...
|
| screenshot:
| https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
| lepetitchef wrote:
| Vertical tab: this is the 1st in my wishlist. I switched to
| Vivaldi before because of this. Can't wait to try it out.
| sweeter wrote:
| I don't understand this. Sideberry is literally 1:1 feature
| parity and had existed for 5 years. Whereas this is not the
| 'tab grouping' that they promised and have been talking about
| for 3 years. This is a massive disappointment.
| sweeter wrote:
| Sigh... No, Mozilla, this is not what we wanted. We already have
| 500 sidebar tab extensions. We wanted horizontal tab groupings.
| It's not that unreasonable. I've been following this issue for 3
| years now and this is what they cough out? I'm over it. I'm
| moving on. So frustrating.
| sealor wrote:
| I recently fixed a Firefox bug to allow easier tab management in
| FF extensions. My hope is that extensions like Tree Style Tab or
| Sidebery benefit from my improvements. I love them!
|
| Title: Updated openerTabId is not notified via tabs.onUpdated if
| it is changed by tabs.update()
|
| https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409262
|
| https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D164982#7511767
| diimdeep wrote:
| I just tried it, and it is not worth it, it just shows flat
| column of favicons without titles, it is better to install
| TreeStyleTab and disable OS window titlebar like this
| https://i.imgur.com/jnEXiPU.png so address bar in custom titlebar
| height is only 34px. I hate material design that still echoes
| useless whitespace everywhere.
|
| https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
| paddy_m wrote:
| I love the mozilla UI for restoring all tabs after a crash. I
| wish I could see that regularly.
| td540 wrote:
| Why don't they lay out browser tabs the full width of the window
| in a vertical accordion so long webpage titles (usually
| containing more than 100's of characters) can be completely
| visible at glance?
| russellbeattie wrote:
| For some reason, I just remembered that OS/2 put window tabs on
| the side. Though looking at a screenshot now [1], I didn't
| remember it was done in a skeuomorphic, 3D way, which definitely
| takes away from their usefulness. Still, what's old is new again.
|
| 1.
| https://files.support.epson.com/htmldocs/c82422/c82422rf/ima...
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Some pictures of it might be nice! :)
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Pretty terrible compared to edge, with edge you can hide the top
| bar if you're using vertical tabs, which actually make it fit a
| purpose, you have more horizontal space, but you can't with
| firefox, they also don't show labels
| rubytubido wrote:
| Good step, but still far away from vivaldi in terms of
| customization without installation of different plugins
| Croftengea wrote:
| For me, the killer feature in vertical tab extensions (STG,
| Sidebery) is the ability to distribute tabs in groups by URLs
| automatically. I wonder if FF is going to support this natively.
| xwall wrote:
| Looks cool, enter key in GPT prompt box not working...
| Slix wrote:
| Microsoft Edge has had this for some time. I was surprised, but
| Edge is pretty modern.
| heraldgeezer wrote:
| Just tried it. Using it as I type. Works and looks very well
| already! Can be both expanded or no text and with the Nightly
| preview feature it is very usable.
| solarkraft wrote:
| I was going to praise Firefox for doing something good for once,
| but I checked it out to be sure. Good thing I did.
|
| - The tabs aren't tree-style (this is the main reason to use
| vertical tabs in the first place)
|
| - The space on the top isn't reclaimed (this would be the USP
| over just using Sidebery)
|
| - It's nice (or, not really) to see that Sidebery sometimes not
| opening isn't actually a Sidebery bug, but a _Firefox bug_ that
| affects _every sidebar user_. I experienced it within the first
| minute and needed to restart the browser. Knowing the project
| there's probably been a bug on it that hasn't been worked on for
| a decade. They badly need to fix so much before thinking about
| new features.
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