Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
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Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
1–10 of 10 posts
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#2I have the opposite problem: I close tabs too soon, but history solves that.
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#3I switched back to horizontal tabs because sidebars eat up too much horizontal screen space.
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#4I have the opposite problem: I close tabs too soon, but history solves that.
Thank goodness to ctrl+shift+T
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#5Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#6For me, tab location is spacial in my mind, and so many years of having them horizontal makes it hard to switch. Somewhere between 25 and 40 I start having trouble finding things at which point I just close them all and start over. I do use the tab drop-down in Firefox, but mostly to more quickly find things I want to close. Also completion in the url bar to find specific open tabs is quite useful.
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#7The sweet spot for me is vertical tabs that autohide into a narrow strip of icons until hovered over (like Edge or certain firefox CSS tweaks)
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#8For me, tab location is spacial in my mind, and so many years of having them horizontal makes it hard to switch. Somewhere between 25 and 40 I start having trouble finding things at which point I just close them all and start over. I do use the tab drop-down in Firefox, but mostly to more quickly find things I want to close. Also completion in the url bar to find specific open tabs is quite useful.
If you use Firefox's URL bar for this, typing % before your search limits the results strictly to open tabs.
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#9>Vertical tabs are not a standard. Chrome does not have them natively. Safari does not have them at all.
Google Chrome added vertical tab support in 2026 Q2 and Safari has had them even longer.
Re: Why I had to stop using vertical tabs
#10I switched back to horizontal tabs because sidebars eat up too much horizontal screen space.
This is a valid reason to switch back, but I'd also like to call out that UX designers need to do more for users with limited horizontal space. Many users rely on split-screen mode to see two windows simultaneously, or maybe three windows simultaneously if they've got a widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio monitor.