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Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

brave.com

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Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#31
post #29

It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar. You can see in the video they posted that it saves almost no vertical space, while now taking up a massive amount of horizontal space.

Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we typically don't watch movies in the office.

> Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we don't typically watch movies in the office.

That's on the right track, but going too far. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more reasonable.

The idea of using 16:9 screens for work needs to die in a fire.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#32

It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar. You can see in the video they posted that it saves almost no vertical space, while now taking up a massive amount of horizontal space.

> It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar.

Honestly, that's not the main selling point of vertical tabs for me. Horizontal tabs don't scale for more than a dozen or so, but vertical tabs do. The "wasted" horizontal space is useless for reading most page, but displays enough data for practical navigation, and the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#33
post #31
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we typically don't watch movies in the office.

> Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we don't typically watch movies in the office. That's on the right track, but going too far. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more reasonable. The idea of using 16:9 screens for work needs to die in a fire.

IMO the closer the ratio gets to 1 the better but the only fact I have for this is 1280x1024 (5:4) being better than 1024x768 (4:3)

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#34
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tree Style Tabs were released for Firefox around 2007 https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en#history I am not sure if someone like Opera was earlier, but Arc is likely copying this.

> I am not sure if someone like Opera was earlier OmniWeb 5.0, 2004: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/02/ow5/3/#tabs

Opera 4 had them in 2000. Opera 3 might have, but it won't run on Windows 10 so I can't easily check.

edit: Started up a VM -- Opera 3 didnt have tabs at all, although it did already have an MDI.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

who needs bookmarks when you can have 750 tabs open at once?

The latter is more valuable to the ad tech industry. In fact, they benefit from browsers with crippled bookmarking systems. Every time a user types in "facebook" instead of facebook.com into the omnibar, that user is directed to a Google/Bing/Brave Search page with ads.

I can't live with Braves terrible bookmark manager, and inability to save history for more than a few months. But I can't live without the flawless ad blocking.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#36
post #23

I've been using Firefox with Tab Center Reborn, and a config which collapses the tabs so only the favicons are visible. Using Shift-Tab, Ctrl-Shift-Tab and Ctrl-T, Ctrl-W to go around and open/close is so logical for me. First time I heard about Tree style tabs I was so against them because they occupied significant amount of space and I didn't know you could collapse them. I don't see myself ever going back horizont…

Tree Style Tabs work well, because screen estate is not wasted on 16:9 and 16:10 style displays. Web browsing is mostly reading task and because of usability, line length cannot exceed a certain width. Thus, there is more screen estate horizontally around the page than vertically on top and bottom of the page you are reading.

I liked vertical tabs on my main monitor where there is plenty of space. But on the laptop, especially with using split screen i got too crowded. I have since made the tabs completely invisible and just navigate trough them with the Vimium extension.

This has some quirks because of the limitations a browser extension has, but I now much prefer to just use keyboard shortcuts and search to jump to tabs.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#39

It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar. You can see in the video they posted that it saves almost no vertical space, while now taking up a massive amount of horizontal space.

They certainly do save space on Firefox (with the right config). In the default setting, there is OS title bar, then a address+icon bar, then the tab bar. After installing sidebar tabs, you can remove the tab bar with some css, which saves about 5% of the vertical screen space.

You can also remove that unnecessarily large sidebar header that Firefox insists on not letting users disable via normal means with userchrome mods. Some such setups can be seen at https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#40

Everyone is copying Arc. Microsoft showed a similar design to what Arc has along with vertical tabs.

The crucial difference is keeping the address bar- this is where I think Arc is falling short. Maybe it's me, but I have an extremely difficult time reprogramming my expectations of where the address bar should be.
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