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Comment by jimpudar | Hacker News Reader

Edge has vertical tabs built in. Many other browsers can be made to have vertical tabs with plugins.

Edge is not free. I wouldn't seriously consider using a non-free application for something as essential as everyday web browsing.

You can't really have usable vertical tabs in Chromium via plugins either, unless you're content with wasting a lot of horizontal space for an ugly sidebar and vertical space for uselessly duplicated tab bar.

Firefox is the only actual choice I'm aware about.

> I wouldn't seriously consider using a non-free application for something as essential as everyday web browsing.

Why? Are you considering forking Firefox?

For clarification - if you either contribute code or money to Firefox, you are clearly supporting the existence of a free browser.

I don’t see how just using it does. So if you aren’t contributing to it you may as well use the browser with the best feature set for your use case.

Marketshare is important, default search engine revenue is based on usage.

It’s not really ‘free’ if it has to produce ad revenue.

It is irrelevant to it being free.

No it isn’t. The direction of development is controlled by the need for funding.

The direction of development is irrelevant to it being free.

If it is controlled by corporate interests, it is not free.

Being controlled by corporate interests is completely orthogonal to being free. A lot of Free Software is being controlled by corporate interests and there's nothing wrong with it.

Using Firefox definitely supports the existence of a free browser. Loss of market share is the #1 threat to the continued existence of a free browser. Beyond the obvious (if a tree falls in a forest, crushing the last copy of the code for a browser that has zero users, then was it a browser at all?):

    lower market share =>
    nobody testing against the free browser or fixing site breakage =>
    quirks (bugs, underdefined specifications, nonstandard features) of other browsers becoming required for a functional Web =>
    free browser is no longer a browser of the actual Web.

I agree that submitting bug reports or patches is an important contribution.

I don’t see how that relates to market share, since regular users won’t do that.

Given that the issue of Firefox being forced to restart primarily happens on Linux, I doubt Edge is an option for them. Though I have to concur that Edge has one of the most stable and smooth vertical tab implementations around, most of the plugin-based ones are more fully featured but much less reliable.

Edge has been released for Linux a while now... not that I know anyone who uses it, but it's available for those who need it.

I use it, and it's decent. And more in the vein of "it's not google" though I do slightly prefer the chrome dev tools to the modifications that Edge has made. I don't like a lot of the "helpers" for shopping though. And definitely don't like the article wall with ads that are really hard to block/script out.

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