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Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

blog.nightly.mozilla.org

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Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#31

Post by rkangel »

radlad wrote: post #16
doix wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 th…

AFAIK, Tree Style Tab still exists? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#32

Post by knallfrosch »

tapoxi wrote: post #21
gkoberger wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

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.

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#33

Post by jwells89 »

KaiMagnus wrote: post #20

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…

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#34

Post by buo »

KaiMagnus wrote: post #20

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…

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

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#35

Post by wasteduniverse »

twobitshifter wrote: post #13
osbulbul wrote: post #6

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 :)

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.

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#37

Post by knallfrosch »

wenc wrote: post #26

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.

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#38

Post by slightwinder »

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?
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