Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

brave.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 270 posts

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#71

Post by fellowniusmonk »

stonogo wrote: post #34
Lammy wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I used Opera over other browsers for a long time for performance reasons, it had M2, my favorite email client ever to this day, which got rid of traditional "folders", there's an alternate timeline somewhere where Opera won the browser wars and they already have flying cars and a federated web.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#72

Post by nirvdrum »

slily wrote: post #42

Why do people need dozens or hundreds of tabs to the point that they need groups for them? We've had bookmarks (and folders for them) for decades... It made way more sense when you could expect tabs to always be loaded, and not behave like another set of bookmarks.

There's two primary reasons for me:

  * Convenience
  * Tooling
It's more convenient to keep tabs open. With Tree Style Tabs on Firefox and Orion's vertical tabs I can retain the relationship. The browser generally keeps it cached so even if the site goes offline I can read what I need to. If I have a form partially entered, I can resume it. If the page has infinite scroll but doesn't update the URL, I can stay where I was. Some sites tie resources to a particular session so resuming from a bookmark won't get you to the resource anyway.

But, I can also find things faster if they're on a pile on my desk than I can if they're put away in a drawer so I'm sure it's different for everyone.

As for tooling, I think browsers just aren't very good at bookmark management. I find the sidebar for bookmarks borderline useless, but a tree of tabs in the same space is quite efficient for me. The bookmark manager isn't much better. We can use folders, but not really have the rich links the web was designed for. I often have both the HN discussion and article open with either a parent-child or sibling relationship in my vertical tabs. That's not easily replicated with bookmarks.

The other tooling issue is tab management isn't great. Chrome's shrinking tabs is terrible HCI; you can't read them and they become harder to click. Finding a tab can be frustrating. It's often easier to open a new tab to complete a task than go hunting for the one I want. Pinning tabs doesn't work great with multiple windows and seeing just the favicon isn't super helpful if you need to pin two pages from the same domain.

Between the tabs I keep open because that's how my brain works best and between tabs I get stuck with because browsers haven't provided better tooling, it's easy to grow into the hundreds and then periodically cull them.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#73

Post by locusofself »

amelius wrote: post #29
biggestfan wrote: post #2

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.

It's not ridiculous at all if you have to compare two documents side-by-side which is something I do 10 times a day while coding whether its documentation+code or doing a git diff

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#74

Post by RandallBrown »

scelerat wrote: post #59

OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question. I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development e…

Much to my surprise, you can still download and use OmniWeb.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more

I only tried it on a few websites but it worked remarkably well.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#75

Post by mcint »

svet_0 wrote: post #47

Brave gives a very bad vibe (mostly due to the affiliate links scandal), I prefer to just use my favorite browsers (ff/edge) + uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger which give good privacy/adblock experience, are open source and customizable to my liking.

Brave's encroachments can be turned off. On a new install, I disable the search bar Rewards icon, extensions area Wallet, and new tab page Sponsored Images, News, and Cards. (And maybe others still). Each of these requires active engagement from a user to produce and signal for a 3rd party.

Meanwhile, they also fund novel privacy and security research [1], including preventing advanced fingerprinting. In essence, the maintain a patch set on top of Chromium (the open source base of Chrome, that Edge also builds on) which more convincingly respects user privacy, security, and choice[2][3][4]. See how much effort they put into keeping Brave Ads convincingly private [5].

Each of these is less intrusive than changes (to stay recent and relevant) include direct partnership for promotions [6].

Or to base beliefs on a series of news reports that sound bad, see a longer list [7], though it's quite noisy list.

[1]: https://brave.com/research/

[2]: https://github.com/brave/brave-browser/issues/14942

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federated_Learning_of_Cohorts

[4]: https://brave.com/why-brave-disables-floc/

[5]: https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360026361072-Bra...

[6]: https://itsfoss.com/firefox-looking-glass-controversy/

[7]: https://chefkochblog.wordpress.com/2022/03/03/mozilla-histor...

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#76

Post by starky »

james_pm wrote: post #18

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

I've been using vertical tabs for well over a decade starting with Opera, then tree style tabs for Firefox, and now Vivaldi. I refuse to use a browser without the ability. Arc hasn't innovated anything there.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#78

Post by mikelward »

quesera wrote: post #70
blairbeckwith wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe they mean shift-cmd-c and it copies the current URL to the clipboard. Comparable to cmd-L + cmd-C in one keystroke.

Thanks! (Not a user of the browser in question) But Cmd+L+C is exactly the same number of sequential keypresses as Cmd+Shift+C. So I guess Firefox has this desirable behaviour covered!

With the caveat that it changes where the cursor is.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#79

Post by [deleted] »

scelerat wrote: post #59

OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question. I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development e…

[deleted]

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#80

Post by nomel »

Cyberdog wrote: post #69
scelerat wrote: post #59

OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question. I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development e…

OmniWeb was great! I think Opera still did it first, though. I moved on to Safari after it died, but I missed vertical tabs dearly and still do. Hopefully this idea catches on well enough for the Safari team to finally steal it.

Yes, I remember Opera having it around that same time, and Firefox having a plugin to copy it. I think the Firefox plugin had full "tab tree" support though. I believe it died after one of the many updates that changed how plugins worked, although I haven't checked in a couple of decades to see if something similar has appeared.
Post reply on HN