Tabs on the side? | Hacker News Reader

Tabs on the side?

azarask.in

43 pointsKeithMajhor25 comments

I've used the Tree Style Tab extension ( https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890/ ) for more than a year now and I have a very hard time browsing without it. Makes a lot of sense with today's widescreen displays. Only thing that bugs me with it is that I can only use the default Firefox theme on OS X. If I change theme it breaks really bad.

One thing that TST really lacks is grouping as on OPs screenshot. I wish I could make a group of 'unclosable' tabs which I have always open such as Gmail, Bitbucket, Tadalist, and have casual browsing in other group, after a separator.

Yeah, that'd be a good thing. I tend to keep permanent tabs (last.fm, grooveshark etc) in a separate window (2 windows in total). When/if I close Firefox I just chose to "Save and Quit" and the tabs are still there when I restart. Not optimal at all, but works for pages that I don't follow links in new tabs from.

I use chrome for music (currently mixcloud playing), this way I can restart ff without stopping music. And have it on the 3rd or 4th workspace so it doesn't bother me on my working ones

Use Tab Kit instead. You won't get those nice labels you see in the screenshot, but you can protect tabs and you can group them.

A trick I use is to make a new tree starting with a google search for the group's name, such as "Web Mail" and putting all the related tabs under it. This woorks because Google puts the search term first as the title.

That was the only way I could browse with Firefox for the last 8 or so months before switching to Chrome (which I did a year and a half ago). I hadn't thought about vertical tab lists until seeing this article; it really was an awesome way to browse. I think seeing the indentation was more pivotal than the fact that the tabs were on the side.

No thanks.

* Vertical height is scarce... unless you're trying to fit two windows side-by-side.

* The nice thing about horizontal tabs is when they fill up the tab bar they just shrink rather than disappearing. You can't really shrink vertical tabs.

* I'd rather have my tabs take up 30px by [screen width] than 200px by [screen height]. This looks very wasteful of space.

* The default state of the browser is a single tab, in which case tons of space would be wasted. In applications where most of the space is usually used (a hierarchical file browser, for example) the vertical orientation makes more sense.

Don't you think it will improve vertical space if tabs goes to side, also these days all the laptops have widescreen - this will be quite useful there.

As for the default state of the browser, the tab bar can be made to appear only when second tab is opened or something like that.

The way I often use the browser is having one window next to the other. If I had tabs on the side, this would no longer be possible. Nevertheless, i once gave a try to tabs on side, bud it only convinced me that this is not very useful.

Add to that:

* horizontal scrolling websites are regarded as undesirable; vertical scrolling is expected behaviour (and a >320px pane adequate to display a reasonable fraction of a title + favicon will result in horizontal scrolling for most users on a typical 960px width website)

If I want a vertical list of my tabs I can get a pull-down menu using the existing interface...

Vertical tabs have a huge advantage, collapsible tree. For instance I have HN tab, and all the other links I opened from there collapse under it when I open a new tab. This way I frequently have up to 60 or 80 open tabs without them overloading at the bottom. On the other hand, with horizontal tabs I can't see much more than 20 of them at once on my 24" screen.

That's a really good idea, and one that I would consider giving up the extra real estate for. What browser/extensions can do this?

"Tree Style Tab" does it.

The tree style tabs extension for Firefox is what kept me from (eventually) switching to Chrome. Chrome is superior in a lot of ways but I do wish they'd make the layout a bit more customizable/extensible.

With the latest Chrome you can try the --enable-vertical-tabs command line option.

See: http://www.howtonew.com/how-to-move-chrome-tabs-to-the-left-... http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-chrome-labs....

I was waiting for Tree Style Tabs to switch to Chrome, finally gave up and switched anyway two weeks ago. While the vertical tabs option does exist in Chrome, it's inferior to the Firefox offering in a number of ways. In particular, there's no tab grouping / collapsing, and the UI is really still ugly and not themable (at least on OSX, tabs retain their 'top tabs' shape, there's an unchangeable blue background on the tab bar, and tab dragging does not work properly). IMO, not ready for prime time yet ... hopefully soon though.

This app-specific myopia drives me nuts. As other commentators have noted, the right place for the tab functionality is in the window manager. The effort would be better spent working with desktop vendors to support a cross-platform and cross-application tiling and tabbing API.

Unfortunately, I use cascaded windows as a way of selecting which window I want active. I detailed my technique here: http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-win...

This means that my browser window, in its natural shape for cascaded windows on a wide screen, is approximately square: the left hand side of the wide screen is filled with the left edges of smaller windows (mostly terminals, sometimes with status text scrolling by, busy compiling or with other jobs), with the bottom-left corner of the screen containing desktop widgets telling me about my CPU/GPU temperatures and the current time in California.

I moved the Windows start bar to the left, and I moved my firefox tabs to the left.

It just makes a lot more sense, seeing that most other apps (Outlook, Explorer) I use also have their hierarchy on the left...

I had been using that setup for years and its a great way to maximize screen area (although using Opera). In Mac OS X, I also have the dock in the left.

I've experimented with tabs on the side for a while (tree-tabs in FF, and vertical tabs in chrome). While side tabs work nice when your browser consumes the whole screen, I usually work by having two browser instances (one on the left, one on the right) instead. At that point, horizontal screen real estate becomes more crucial.

I figured aza's tab candy (panorama) is really the nice compromise in letting you organize tabs (a la treetabs). It just needs to be refined to where it can be set as the home page so you get used to that workflow.

Once you get past a certain number of tabs[1], neither horizontal or vertical works very well. I'd like to see a browser that worked along the same lines as Emacs' buffers, where you have no tabs, but an ability to show a list of open pages, and a quick way to switch directly to the page you want. 'C-x b gmail', along with an IDO clone would be great.

[1] I have 103 tabs currently open. Writing that makes me feel like an idiot!

I like my tabs on the top. This is a great though if your more of a tabs on the side kind of guy.

I use a 24" screen i rotate for keeping websites nice and long. Same goes for code. Its great for keeping more lines of code and text on a screen.

do window-managers support title-bar on the side ? should be useful i think.

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