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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
Nobody will probably read this anymore but I had the same problem and used the same solution - starting my browsers as
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customera (nice dark theme, custom list of extensions and corporate bookmarks)
$ google-chrome --profile-directory=customerb (yeallow-blue theme to stand out)
and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy
That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev
anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)
I recommend Tree Tabs over Tree Style Tabs as it let's you make tab groups. I will basically have one group per ticket or project, coloring the group depending on the state of that ticket (eventually going green when I've completed it but want to keep it around for a short while in case questions arise). Once the ticket has been done for a sprint I'll close the entire tab group.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
I tried it out and it seems clear that vertical tabs without titles create too much friction for daily driving a browser where you have many tabs open, hover thumbnails or not.
For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.
Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.
I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.
Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.
But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.
I don't care much about vertical tabs but what I want from tabs is automatic grouping by site. I'm surprised nobody made this.
I know there are extension supporting grouping but i have never seen any that automatically groups by website.
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()
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] Retr0id|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nine_k|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacoblambda|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] somishere|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] filcuk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] __david__|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] rimunroe|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nixass|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] travelthrowaway|1 year ago|reply
and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy
That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev
anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)
[+] [-] concordDance|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Eridrus|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] KaiMagnus|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] worble|1 year ago|reply
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".
[+] [-] buo|1 year ago|reply
https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
[+] [-] attendant3446|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tagbert|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jorvi|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jwells89|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] FuturisticGoo|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] burkaman|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] andrepd|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] RunSet|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ThrowawayTestr|1 year ago|reply
How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.
[+] [-] mchem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] supriyo-biswas|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|1 year ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] eviks|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] misswaterfairy|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stiltzkin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] BiteCode_dev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stemlord|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nullhole|1 year ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] phartenfeller|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] osbulbul|1 year ago|reply
So we are lonely in the dark :)
[+] [-] da_rob|1 year ago|reply
https://imgur.com/hoOlRDy
Happy that this will finally be a feature of FF. Still pretty useless for me, though, for these reasons:
- There's an empty tab bar shown at the top of the window.
- Currently, there's now way to enable a wider sidebar that shows tab titles, too.
[+] [-] dymk|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] whycome|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] replete|1 year ago|reply
For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.
Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.
I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.
Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.
But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.
[+] [-] wenc|1 year ago|reply
I tried TST once but didn’t get why they were bettter than horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.
[+] [-] Shadowed_|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] edallme|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] sealor|1 year ago|reply
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
[+] [-] quibono|1 year ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] PetitPrince|1 year ago|reply
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 ?
[+] [-] codazoda|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] stiltzkin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dsp_person|1 year ago|reply
https://gist.github.com/digitalsignalperson/7e5d4a44fbd7427a...
screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....
[+] [-] qwerty456127|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] vladvasiliu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] dmichulke|1 year ago|reply