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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

#221

Post by eviks »

dustincoates wrote: post #64
ss48 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could check out Vivaldi. The split view is pretty robust. The Vertical tabs can be on left or right, and allow one level of tab grouping.

I really, really want to like Vivaldi, but it's just so slow for me on Windows. It has a similar problem on Linux, though a restart a few times a day solves it.

Yeah, performance is its biggest downside.

Is it slow with a fresh profile? It can become suprisingly slow as session files grow, but cleaning it can revert some of that

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#222

Post by akkartik »

persnickety wrote: post #220
akkartik wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving? My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as poss…

I'm using Firefox. I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history. I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff. I often want to anno…

I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world.

I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#223

Post by krzyk »

CuriousCosmic wrote: post #134
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…

Unfortunately it doesn't work for pinned tabs - I use them for pages that I want to keep for longer and remember about them. Bookmarks are used for something that I store and go back to it seldom (e.g. when I store a recipe).

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#224

Post by krzyk »

dizhn wrote: post #88
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.

After a certain number Chromium based browsers stop showing the new tabs.

And usually stop working because they used up all the memory. I went back to Firefox after a week of using Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with my 100+ open tabs.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#225

Post by PawgerZ »

__david__ wrote: post #165
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…

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.

Fellow tab hoarder here (though I pale in comparison to your 2630). I had the exact same experience starting with tree style tabs and switching to sideberry. Very comparable, but I agree that Sideberry feels a bit nicer, and it has wicked customizability settings.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#226

Post by rimunroe »

Izkata wrote: post #218
rimunroe wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_). People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) aren't always disorganized. In fact, they're often organized to an unusually high degree (sometimes to a fault). I've been diagnosed since 1996 and I rarely have more than 10 or 12 tabs open across all windows at a time. Paying close attention…

> People with ADHD ("ADD" is a very outdated term) The old naming scheme made more sense than the current one. Under the current definition there are three types of ADHD, of which the "inattentive" type used to be called ADD because it doesn't have the "hyperactivity" trademark. So for that type "ADHD" is a misnomer that causes people to not even consider they may have it.

That's a fair point and I'm probably just being overly touchy. I have ADHD-C and (perhaps unsurprisingly) favor ADHD-* nomenclature for distinguishing inside the umbrella. I think a large part of my aversion to "ADD" is because in the past I've mostly heard it used by people who saying they're "so ADD" when describing normal behavior (the same way people refer to being "OCD about X").

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#227

Post by iamtedd »

asdajksah2123 wrote: post #87
wenc wrote: post #26

Naive question, why are vertical tabs in the sidebar desirable? I tried TST once but didn’t get why they were bettter than horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.

1. Screens are usually wider than most web pages usefully support. This uses up space that would normally be wasted. 2. Most screens are wider than they're high. This is especially true of laptops. So using vertical space for a horizontal strip really eats into the vertical real estate. 3. Most written scripts are horizontal. As a result, lists are usually arranged vertically. This aligns with how lists in nearly eve…

6. It's the only alternative if you want to keep UI elements out of your title bar.

Re: Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

#230

Post by Vinnl »

fabrice_d wrote: post #153
kjkjadksj wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's already a GUI (launch firefox with the --profileManager command line flag), but it's very barebone.

And also about:profiles, with the same caveat.
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