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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

#331
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 need…

Recommend you to check out Sideberry [it is, I think, just outright better than tree style tabs].

[deleted]

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#332

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.

There's a setting "Open links in tabs instead of new windows" which should help your use case

You'd think so. I did, too. But it doesn't work well enough.

Even Firefox's own UI doesn't honor it: for example, the settings open in a tab even though that box is unticked.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#333
post #86

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, particula…

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 :)

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#334
post #86

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, particula…

I'm using less and less tabs the less useful search engines become.

Nowadays I don't get the tabs "squished" at all. But that used to happen often, and with no impact on my capacity to use them.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#335

I really really want this to be a part of firefox, but they should have waited to blog about it until it spent a litle more time in the oven. First impressions were not great, on a number of fronts: - i could not for the life of me get the tabs to be anything other than the favicons. i tried the suggestion to show sidebar, but that option was not available. - toggling the setting resulted in duplicate menu bar entrie…

The button next to the refresh button is what makes the side bar show wider tabs (Icon, title, close button). It took me way too long to figure that out.

sitting right in front of me the whole time. thanks.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#337
post #86

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, particula…

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 started with tree-style tabs but I'm now using "Sideberry" which seems to be a little nicer.

Could you qualify this? I always see the recommendation but I never see any reasons to prefer Sidebery over Tree-Style Tabs.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#338

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…

Opera had a very mature & expressive implementation of this feature back before version 15 (when they adopted Chromium). Since then, Vivaldi (created by Opera founder) is trying to rebuild all of the OG Opera features - they have this feature now; not as powerful as it once was but they're working on it.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#339

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…

> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated.

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.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree, and don't get all the fuss about Chrome (or any other browser's) UI. To me they look all very similar and function very similarly. The differences just don't seem that big of a deal. I think it is mostly people being resistant to change. I had one friend that I convinced to switch to FireFox after a year[0]. A month after he switched over I got him to admit that it was easy to switch and there's no re…

I also thought that Firefox latest redesign was quite bad. This project fixes it and it's easy to install : https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix

I don't have a problem with the current design, but you're right that this is better. I'll give it a try, thanks!
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