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Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

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Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#161

Post by brigandish »

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…

The per-site settings feature was so easy to use; it also had "workspaces" so you could group tabs and open them all at once.

I paid for that browser and I still would.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#162

Post by Torwald »

Tagbert wrote: post #115
bradgessler wrote: post #92

The more enhancements I see browser vendors making to tabs, the more I think they’re reinventing bookmarks/favorites. Safari introduced “tab groups” a while back, which to me is an insane mess of complexity. When I think about it though they’re just folders and each tab is a bookmark/favorite. The vertical tabs in Brave remind me of bookmarks/favorites too.

For me, tab groups are nothing like bookmarks. Tab groups are a way of managing already open tabs in related group; showing and hiding groups as you need them. I use a similar tool in Firefox and I always have tabs related to about 4-5 projects open at once. I use the tab group tool to switch between the tabs by project so I only need to deal with 10-15 tabs at once. These are tabs that I don’t want to close as they…

Care to share the Ff plug-in you use? Would you recommend it or is another tool in that space better?

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#163

Post by weikju »

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.

Vertical tabs are already a thing in Safari with tabgroups although it doesn’t completely remove the horizontal tabs

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#164

Post by Alifatisk »

behnamoh wrote: post #107
ojkelly wrote: post #83

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning). It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing…

And not an IDE like VSCode, but a fully customizable IDE. It's so frustrating to yearn for basic features in VSCode only to be ignored for years. For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar. We can't customize tabs either. No vertical tabs like Edge. No tabs height customization. It's either their way or the highway. A gripe with Brave: Why doesn't the mouse-over f…

> For example, on macOS, a good amount of space is wasted because we can't hide the menu/title bar.

It was possible with extensions like titleless and monkey patch, but Microsoft did something recently that made these extensions not work on newer versions.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#166

Post by usrbinbash »

This basically adresses my biggest gripe with tabs in an elegant way:

The primary input mechanism for dealing with a large amount of "list entries" in any GUI software, nowadays is scrolling. While scrolling can be implemented in horizontal tabs, browsers prevented it from being used efficiently. Tabs all have to fit on that bar, and if they don't, for some reason you couldn't scroll but had to click little buttons, or if you could scoll, it wouldve been a bad UX, since tabs horizontal scrolling goes too fast for the user, or takes too long.

Vertical tabs. Nice. From now on, any browser not offering this feature, shouldn't even bother applying. Nicely done Brave!

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#168

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

ojkelly wrote: post #83

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning). It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing…

Early versions of Opera (maybe 20 years ago or so, I don't remember when exactly) had real MDI, where the tabs were subwindows rather than actual tabs. You could arrange them however you wanted, tile, cascade, etc.

For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.

Re: Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

#169

Post by junon »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #168
ojkelly wrote: post #83

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE. Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning). It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing…

Early versions of Opera (maybe 20 years ago or so, I don't remember when exactly) had real MDI, where the tabs were subwindows rather than actual tabs. You could arrange them however you wanted, tile, cascade, etc. For me, it was the pinnacle of browser UI. Everything that came after that (including of course later iterations of Opera, which removed the MDI) has been considerably worse.

I really, really liked a lot of Opera's ideas. I think someone on that team really understood good UI design principles, at least at the feature level. If memory serves it included an IRC client at least, and maybe even an FTP client? Can't remember about the latter, but definitely the former.

Perhaps a bit "bloated" for its time, but it was always pretty sleek to use. In fact I don't exactly remember why it never became mainstream. Maybe it had too many quirks or lagged behind others in terms of the new features, which... isn't entirely its own fault.

Looking at it now, it seems to have an identity crisis now. It looks like it has Whatsapp integration, among other things, which is the absolute last thing I'd ever want my browser to have an integration with.

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