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Comment by james_pm | Hacker News Reader

Everyone is copying Arc. Microsoft showed a similar design to what Arc has along with vertical tabs.

I don't really think anyone is copying anyone here. This is a popular feature for browsers that has been around for over a decade.

Orion[1] is another recent MacOS browser that released before Arc in 2021 and has vertical tabs. Edge had vertical tabs as an experiment back in 2020[2] and is full feature now. Vivaldi has had vertical tabs since 2015[3]. It might not count since it's not built in, but Firefox has had vertical tab extensions since 2007[4].

[1]https://browser.kagi.com/

[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...

[3]https://www.maketecheasier.com/vertical-tabs-browsers/

[4]https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/graphs/contributors

Tree Style Tabs were released for Firefox around 2007

https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en#history

I am not sure if someone like Opera was earlier, but Arc is likely copying this.

> I am not sure if someone like Opera was earlier

OmniWeb 5.0, 2004: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2004/02/ow5/3/#tabs

Yep, OmniWeb was the first place I saw the of the vertical tabs back in the mid-00s. Blew my mind.

The concept of “drawers” that OS X had at the time was well suited for this kind of thing, with some “free” (in terms of dev effort) flexibility of allowing the user to choose which edge they unfurled from. It’s too bad they fell out of style in favor of much more static sidebars.

Opera 4 had them in 2000. Opera 3 might have, but it won't run on Windows 10 so I can't easily check.

edit: Started up a VM -- Opera 3 didnt have tabs at all, although it did already have an MDI.

I used Opera over other browsers for a long time for performance reasons, it had M2, my favorite email client ever to this day, which got rid of traditional "folders", there's an alternate timeline somewhere where Opera won the browser wars and they already have flying cars and a federated web.

Windows common controls had side-aligned tabs around 1997

OS/2 2.1: https://guidebookgallery.org/screenshots/os221#general, released December 1993.

The crucial difference is keeping the address bar- this is where I think Arc is falling short. Maybe it's me, but I have an extremely difficult time reprogramming my expectations of where the address bar should be.

Hide all of it - all things not the page itself. The only time the address bar, settings accessibility, etc should be visible is upon Ctrl+L

I've been using vertical tabs for well over a decade starting with Opera, then tree style tabs for Firefox, and now Vivaldi. I refuse to use a browser without the ability. Arc hasn't innovated anything there.

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