Testing the Firefox Alternatives

> You can totally still stick with Firefox… but remember to download userChrome.css from GitHub. And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs.

I'm a constant critic of most things Mozilla (as well as an avid Firefox user... there's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram) and most of what this intro rails against resonates, but I'll never understand why they get hammered for not implementing vertical tabs.

This is a feature that a small but passionate subset of their users use, but it's also a feature that already has an extension that said subset of their users uses. Further, said subset has a strong overlap with the never-Chromium crowd, so they're not going to lose them any time soon. Out of the thousand and one things that Mozilla could be doing to make Firefox more competitive, vertical tabs is solidly in the second half of the list.

Waterfox is nearly same as Librewolf; it comes with own set of additional settings and tweaks. From what I saw around some users weren't fond of the arrangements the author of the project went into (startpage, fastly) and bundling of tree tabs extension that had to be disabled by about:config entry change.

Pale Moon: IIRC initially it was a fork of Firefox ESR then project switched to own Goanna engine, which in turn is a fork of Gecko; it also tries to keep alive XUL extensions platform. There were some dramas happening in the past around the project, esp. regarding porting browser to OpenBSD. It's kinda a niche project I'd say - surely it has some community but it's not that big.

As for IceCat - I'm surprised it's still around; seems it runs own extensions database (https://gnuzilla.gnu.org/mozzarella/) but these aren't keeping up with official releases, at least on the page. Perhaps autoupdate bumps these to the current versions; still, uBlock Origin is stuck at 1.51.0 from last December, while the current version is 1.59.0.

I tried Zen recently - it's kinda hard to get used to tabs sidebar. For some people this might be useful but not for me - I prefer tabs on top.

> And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs. (You know, like Chromium-based browsers including Edge and Vivaldi already have.)

I've been using vertical tabs in Firefox ever since Mozilla implemented it back in 2016 as "Tab Center" long before any Chromium-based browser decided to do so too. Of course the official feature has been discontinued long time ago, but I've been a happy user of its webext-based replacement ever since. Just a bit of CSS goes a long way in making it compact and well-integrated, unlike stuff like Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs that always felt big, clunky and filled with stuff I never use. For the past 8 years, my Firefox looked like this: https://dosowisko.net/firefox-tabcenter.gif and I never stumbled upon a reasonable alternative, including the native implementation Mozilla recently added back into Firefox (though it's a step in the right direction).

Well, the entry barrier is higher than simply installing an extension. You also need to change the userChrome.ccs (if I remember the file correctly), to get rid of the horizontal tabs.

For a base/intermediate user, that's not a simple thing to do.

Edge and Safari have had vertical tabs for years; when the default browsers on Windows and macOS offer that affordance, it becomes more of a mainstream parity issue. Which is thankfully, finally, being addressed.