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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

#131

Post by Eridrus »

Retr0id wrote: 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 feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate.

These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.

In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#132

Post by PcChip »

hbn wrote: post #122
Retr0id wrote: 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…

Yeah, I gave an honest shot at using vertical tabs for a few months because it frankly does seem like a more logical use of screen real estate. Web pages don't tend to take up much horizontal space, so you might as well put a bigger list of tabs there where they can all show more text. For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and right. And…

>I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to clean up.

I wish I had your discipline, I just open new browser windows and start more tabs there

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#133

Post by thro1 »

doix wrote: post #5
phartenfeller wrote: post #2

A screenshot of how it looks would have been helpful. I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

> 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…

> the plugin system is very rich

- like mplayer or vlc plugins to play every video format independently of browsers licence - right ?

> you could do whatever you wanted with XUL

- except undoing it (restartless extensions) - but you could do better without it anyway.. (XBL was to powerfull idea ;)

.. except since you couldn't hook in early enough to replace some XPCOM pieces before they are cached.. anymore.. RIP Firefox.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#134

Post by CuriousCosmic »

Retr0id wrote: 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…

Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.

I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.

Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#135

Post by kjkjadksj »

Eridrus wrote: post #131
Retr0id wrote: 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 feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate. These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc. In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open…

I do this with my browser windows but just open the treestyle tab menu with f1. You only need it when you need it anyhow.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#136

Post by JasonSage »

Eridrus wrote: post #131
Retr0id wrote: 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 feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate. These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc. In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open…

> In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.

Firefox has multiple ways you can do the tab search.

- Firefox View is an icon originally configured at the front of the tab bar that takes you to a dedicated page listing your tabs, recently visited, and lets you search tabs and otherwise manage them.

- Firefox has a tab search built into the address bar as soon as you enter the character '%' followed by a space. So for two sets of two keystrokes you're doing tab search: `Ctrl + '% '`.

IMO the latter especially is fast and easy enough that I don't miss Chrome's tab search, and I often go into Firefox View just to see what I've got open and trim it down.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#137

Post by kjkjadksj »

ReadCarlBarks wrote: post #120
attendant3446 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly. But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.

They're working on a profile switcher: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...

Can’t you change the user profile in the command line with a flag? Surprised it takes this long to implement that in a gui fashion.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#138

Post by lofenfew »

jwells89 wrote: post #33
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.

The truly unfortunate thing is that it was the perfect such platform, then they took it away in the name of security.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#139

Post by gkoberger »

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.

Yeah, I remember it being a huge internal argument against WebExtensions at the time. (But, security + easy of building + compatibility + speed of developing Firefox + a bunch of other things made the switch off XUL the right choice)

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#140

Post by wtcactus »

doix wrote: post #5
phartenfeller wrote: post #2

A screenshot of how it looks would have been helpful. I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

> 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…

Arc is much more than that, though.

1st. Tabs are both tabs and bookmarks. They exist to be more or less persistent (as long as you add them to folders - I get it, it's not everyone's workflow, but for people like me, it's a blessing).

2nd. It has a brilliant tab sync between devices. Something Firefox doesn't do - in fact, only Edge does that.

3rd. Is much lighter on resources on macOS. Some months ago I decided to give a - yet another - try at Firefox on my MacBook and I started not being able to do my full work day job on battery. At first, I didn't understand what was going on and thought it was docker that was killing the battery. Then I went to investigate, and yup, it was Firefox, again, after all these years of telling that now they are good on macOS. No, they aren't, they still use 4x more battery than Edge, or Arc, or Brave...

TLDR: Give Arc a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

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