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Comment by pwdisswordfish8 | Hacker News Reader

> Then Google decided to make the tabs on top standard for its Chrome browser, which was designed for mobile devices not desktops. On a smartphone it may make sense, as there isn’t room for a full desktop style menu layout. On a desktop it is counterintuitive and breaks workflow with all other programs.

Funnily enough, moving tabs to the top is actually one of the few UI changes I actually agree with and find more logical. Since the address bar and navigation buttons only control the active tab, they logically belong ‘inside’ the tab: switching to a different tab should also switch to a ‘different’ address bar and buttons. (Internally they may be the same object, but that’s just an implementation detail.)

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The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this point, as it is baked into the web).

There's an addon for that, but you no longer can hide the default tab bar! So now it just wastes space up there for me. Mozilla... just one day removed the option to hide it. First from the GUI, then from about:config. And also addons can no longer hide it either.

> The most logical tab position is on the left or right, on desktop, because most of the space on a wide screen display is on the horrizontal axis, and you want to reserve as much vertical space as possible for scrolling websites (which happens vertically, and pretty much cannot be changed at this point, as it is baked into the web).

This assumes a landscape-oriented monitor.

I would suggest trying this out on a portait oriented monitor. Tabs on top make the most sense there.

Also, I would generally suggest trying out a portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.

> portrait oriented monitor. It's quite useful for coding, reading, etc.

Tried, didn't work, chances are you need a browser or a terminal running test/grep or another code file/document side by side. There are very few intances when you only look at one file and whether you see 150 lines or 100 lines doesn't really matter much, when the file is longer than that anyway and a function is often shorter.

Or website should use most of the space sideways on my screen... Not removing content and making usability infinitely worse. How many years until everything is designed for mobile and if it even shows 80 character column it is good for desktop...

So now my tab names are...? Written vertically? I don't think that's the best UI choice.

Of course not, they're written horizontally as usual. Where did you even get the idea they would be written vertically? BTW, even on a laptop screen with vertical tabs I see 31 tab names with ~20 characters in each name. With horizontal tabs, I see 15 tabs with ~5 characters in each name. 9x more information, now that's UI/UX!

You can also shrink the tab bar to just favicons and expand it on hover, similar to this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_rTY8tTAO8

This is exactly how I'm using Firefox right now: https://framagit.org/ariasuni/tabcenter-reborn/-/wikis/theme...

Take a look at Tree Style Tabs [1] or Sidebery [2].

After using tree style tabs it’s very frustrating for me to go back to using other tab styles in other browsers.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

I used them back in my student days but then I realized I needed to stop opening so many tabs and focus on my productivity.

These days you have chromium based choices too: Edge and Vivaldi, which has just become Cinamon's default browser. On Edge you can turn off title bar, for Vivaldi it's the address bar. They look quite neat that way.

They're both simple vertical tabs and not automatically organized as a tree, but to me that trikes the right ballance because I don't want to feel too confortable opening tons of tabs.

I agree. Having tabs on top also makes sense from a Fitts's law perspective. I change tabs much more often than I use the title bar, so making it easier to click the tabs is good UI.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitts%27s_law

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