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Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

darrinhenein.com

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Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#51
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives a clear path to revocation of bad actors as well as future updates.

It also gives a ton of power to a few large organisations at the expense of small dev shops and advanced users.

Firefox doesn't prevent you from installing code directly. I am stating what I find valuable in their add-on marketplace.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#52
post #13

I am enjoying this on OSX. I tried Tree Style Tabs in the past, but was not a fan of how it looked. This looks much better and is working nicely so far. In the future it would be nice to see collapse-able tab groups. Pinned tabs should have a visual distinction, rather than only being pinned to the top. An icon, badge, or subtle change in background shade would work. Looking good!

Thank you! Really appreciate it. My colleague's fork is tackling pinned tabs and some other cool ideas, check it out! https://github.com/dhdemerson/VerticalTabs

One idea I'd just thought of adding might be to use the empty space below the tabs with a top-list of frequently used URLs, excluding those already open. And maybe the most recently closed tabs. Also when mentioning productivity, I immediately thought of putting check boxes or labels on the tabs. Or swipe actions.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#53
post #42
post #2

I've been using Tree Style Tabs[0] with Firefox for a long time. Being able to nest tabs and then collapse them is awesome. It is hard to live without it when using Chrome (I know there is a similar addon for Chrome[1], but it doesn't have the same feel since it just adds a new window off to the side and still has the tabs across the top). [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta... [1] https:…

+1 for TST On my 1366x768 laptop I use auto-hide[0] so as to not lose too much screen real estate. [0] http://i.imgur.com/LuOWjGw.png

thank you for sharing that feature / option. I needed to be able to do that and didn't know it existed.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#54
I have never understood why this has not been done far sooner and why the big browsers don't at least support the option.

It makes absolutely no sense to use up vertical space on wide-screens (which everyone now has) on tabs that then have to collapse, stack, or shrink when we could take advantage of all that white space left and right of the content to list all the tabs including labels and even add a few more pixels of vertical space.

It's so baffling to me. I don't understand it.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#55
post #54

I have never understood why this has not been done far sooner and why the big browsers don't at least support the option. It makes absolutely no sense to use up vertical space on wide-screens (which everyone now has) on tabs that then have to collapse, stack, or shrink when we could take advantage of all that white space left and right of the content to list all the tabs including labels and even add a few more pixel…

It's not as much as a win if you just don't maximize your browser window.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#56

Where I really want side tabs is on my Android Nexus 7 tablet. On it in Chrome I normally browse the web in portrait mode and I can see the titles of about three tabs, but only a few words of each. With a slide out side panel on the left (activated by dragging left to right from off the screen onto the screen) I would be able to see the titles for 15 or so tabs, with larger press areas and close buttons. I realize fo…

Chrome had side tabs for a long time. It was a 'hidden feature' you had to enable in the about:config screen. But Google knows how you're supposed to surf, and vertical side tabs are not it. So they tore it out. Many issues were opened on their bug tracker asking for it to be replaced, but the final word came down - 'we don't like vertical tabs, and therefore no one can have them. Stop opening new issues.'

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#57
post #54

I have never understood why this has not been done far sooner and why the big browsers don't at least support the option. It makes absolutely no sense to use up vertical space on wide-screens (which everyone now has) on tabs that then have to collapse, stack, or shrink when we could take advantage of all that white space left and right of the content to list all the tabs including labels and even add a few more pixel…

Opera (as usual) had this ability for years, although I have not used recent versions of their browser, so dunno if it's still there. They also added a nice "tab group" feature, which was/is much better than firefox's half-assed tab group feature (which isn't even "visible" by default because it sucks).

EDIT: Can find older versions to check it out here (Appears as 12.17 is the last version which had this): http://www.opera.com/download/guide/?os=windows&list=all. You simply right click the tab bar and it has place> top/left/right/bottom.

I use Firefox now, and couldn't survive without Tree style tabs, although I still miss a significant number of features from Opera, although from what I gather, they basically thrown away most of it and now have not much more than a clone of Chrome. This is baffling to me too - current Opera is a clear regression from what they had 5 years ago.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#58
post #6
post #5

Very nice to see FF designers discovering the joy of vertical tabs, but it seems pretty strange to not have the article mention the traditional solutions to that, like Tree Style Tabs. Are the designers living in a bobble when it comes to extensions?

Thanks for pointing this out, I should have made mention in my post :) I've have seen tree style tabs – which does a great job for more advanced organization of tabs. For my experiments (and Firefox features in general), we try and focus on simplicity and the more general audience.

TST is pretty simple to use and extensible if you want more. What you did was... not really practical. Have you tried using TST for a few days? I promise you won't be able to go back to any other way of browsing.

Re: Side Tabs: Prototyping An Unexpected Productivity Hack

#59
post #39

I've tried many vertical tabs add-ons for Firefox, but, sadly, none are at the point where I can use them consistently. Some issues that I had: - interface buttons disappeared: new tab, tab groups - bugs when reordering tabs - looked out of place/ugly even with the default theme That said, this is a sufficient hindrance for me daily that I'm considering learning add-on development to be able to fix these issues in th…

Recent version of TST are perfect imo. You can customize them exactly how you want them to behave.
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