Sidebery – A Firefox extension for managing tabs and bookmarks in sidebar
github.com
github.com
Only trouble is I had to go to relatively great lengths to hide my horizontal tabs: enable userChrome stylesheets, go to about:support to find my Profile folder, create a chrome folder, create a userChrome.css file and paste contents from [1], and restart. So now I have only the side bar of tree tabs, and a hot key to hide/show. Screencap attached [2] (using classic theme for windows from here [3])
[0] https://arc.net/
[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
[2] https://coltenj.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-20...
[3] https://github.com/malvinas2/ClassicThemeForWindows10/tree/m...
#sidebar-box #sidebar-header {
display: none !important;
}- Go to Tools menu, select "Add-Ons and Themes". You can also go to about:addons in the URL bar.
- On that page, I have on the left: Recommendations, Extensions, Themes, Plugins. Choose Extensions.
- You should be in a page that says, "Manage Your Extensions" near the top. Scroll down to find the one in question, Sidebery in this case.
- To the right of the enable/disable toggle, there is an icon with three dots.
- Click the three-dot icon, select "Manage".
- One of the options is, "Run in Private Windows". Select "Allow".
If I open a private window, Sidebery isn't open by default, but is available if the extension icon is clicked in the bar under the tabs, or I click Ctrl-e to toggle back and forth.
Hope this helps!
what i am saying is, when i open a private window, sideberry does not auto start. I have to press ctrl-e to open it. then it can work as expected.
in normal window (which i dont use) it persists across new windows so i am suspecting this is a bug
One thing I wish sideberry would do is simplify keyboard navitation. I.e. the moment you start typing it should type things in the search and then should should be able to navigate the result without mouse.
Maybe someone here can tell me how I can quickly select tabs if I use container tab groups. The address bar only selects open tabs from the right tab group so it's completely useless to me. For a while I used rofi tab switcher[1] but that magically stopped working so I made a custom rofi script that parses brotab[2] output.
- Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.
- My Attention is directed to the things that I actually need right in that moment
- Even though my booksmarks are more or less messy, I know where to place what, I know where I can find things I need and for the temporary stuff I just have one folder which I work through or sometimes just plainly delete.
I'd say my absolute maximum would be 50 tabs. I doubt, that I ever went above that.
The extension from the OP still sounds nice, even for my use case. Will look into that.
Sidebery has tab groups, which you can then fold. Also has panels, which are basically full-size permanent tab groups (that can be linked to containers).
> Less RAM
It also lets one enable tab unloading for folded tabs. And you can middle-click on a panel to unload all the tabs in it.
Unlike PC RAM which I can expand every time I get a new PC, my mental RAM is limited.
Making sure to put everything I don't need right now into external systems to free up my mental RAM was one of my main takeaways from reading Getting Things Done some 15 years ago, and for me, nested browser tabs is one level of my storage hierarchy.
Also note the word nested.
I can bookmark things, yes, and I do it a lot.
But for me, ctrl-clicking as I read through some documentation first time and then have everything open in a nested level of tabs and then being able to walk backward and forward between a table of contents or a search, concepts, related concepts and related information like blogs or bug reports effortlessly and without losing track of where I am or how I came there (it is just one step up in the hierarchy) is very valuable.
Before I learned to use Tree Style Tabs I'd navigate linearly and be afraid to lose out something important.
Today with TST I am only afraid that someone at Mozilla will finally find a way to totally destroy the extension API, forcing me to go to Mac/Orion (nothing bad about Orion, but I still struggle with Mac shortcuts).
Bookmarks also don’t preserve scroll state or window positions which makes getting things set back up more annoying. It’s easier to just let it all sit open and be exactly as I expect to the next day.
https://tridactyl.xyz/build/static/docs/modules/_src_excmds_...
That said, I've actually ended up using just Tab Stash because yeah, having too much on your Sidebery tree gets messy and now you have to deal with two sets of stashes, and yeah, unlike Tab Stash, Sidebery doesn't let you group them up into sections.
My only complaint with Tab Stash? I wish it retained which Multi-Account Container was used when it stashed a tab. It'd be perfect if it did that.
On a sidenote, I love that Sidebery lets me scroll through the tabs via scroll wheel. It's a thing I missed since I switched to a Mac because last time I checked, you could scroll through tabs on FF Linux but strangely it's not something you can do on Mac.
Somehow it glitches and some groups can become undone, but fortunately I haven't seen that glitch in the last few months, it might be solved for good.
I'll add that collapsed groups can be nested.
* Orion (mac only) - https://browser.kagi.com/
* Brave (mac, windows, linux) - https://brave.com/download/ (right click any tab and then Use vertical tabs)
* Arc (ugh) - https://arc.net
Orion is much more interesting in terms of UI and also in performance, but I have to say that tab management on Arc is superior, as it has the concept of "folders", not only nested tabs. Orion has something like this planned, but there's no clear date.
The solution you're proposing (kanban style) is intriguing and something I would find pretty useful. Might even make me switch to Orion back.
I switched from Orion mainly because Spaces don't share cookies and sessions with each other, meaning that I can have [Private][Work - General][Work - Client] and use for example Gmail in each of those with different accounts, without fear of switching to a personal/work one.
I also lost tabs in Orion when syncing multiple devices, which Arc has handled flawlessly. It's interesting, because they both use iCloud.
As an example: in the email client, the folders appear in the side panel, which is conceptually "above" (to the left of) the tabs. (I use English, and in English we read left-to-right, then top-to bottom.) The problem is that in fact, the folders are logically inside the mail tab: they only pertain to the content of a single tab, but they are shown for all tabs.
It is, IMHO, a design mess, and I have tried to convey this to the company, but it seems uninterested.
A second example of neglect of this L-to-R, top-to-bottom rule is GNOME. In GNOME 3 and above, action buttons in dialog boxes appear in the CSD bar at the top... but I have not yet read the contents of the dialog box, so I do not yet know whether I want that action or not. Logically, the buttons should be at the bottom, and grouped together, and this applies equally to R-to-L scripts (such as Hebrew and Arabic) or to writing systems that are conventionally and classically top-to-bottom _then_ side-to-side, such as Chinese and Japanese.
In my opinion Tree Style is better than nothing but the performance, personalization, etc of Sidebery is something else.
It also meshes well with Firefox Containers, another favorite Firefox feature of mine.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/grasshopper-u...
What's missing from EVERY tab extension is I just want the ability to show tabs in a tree view, like an ASCII art tree. They all do this indented, css-styled BS that doesn't look more compact or better. I just want an ASCII tree.
Anyway, look at Tab Stash for another alternative.
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/simple-tab-group...
Sidebery appealed because it combines bookmarks and tabs, something that was easy with XUL addons before Firefox Quantum. (I used "Vertical tabs (simplified)", "Flat Bookmarks", and "Unified Sidebar" and they all worked together seamlessly. Not since Firefox 57 though: all gone now.)
In the early versions, Sidebery was very unstable and both crashed frequently itself and sometimes took the browser with it.
It seems better now.
But I can't drag a tab out of a window to make a window of its own, and I can't drag tabs from one window to another. Those are sine qua non features for me: mandatory, and I can't use sidebar tabs without them.
I have a highly customized TST installation so I'm hesitant in trying other extensions
But from my experience trying out other extensions doing the same doesn't break anything. I think they all just go off on the tabs FF has open and do their own thing with it, IME you can install several and switch between them no problem (by switching what sidebar is shown).
The only problem so far I have with Sidebery is that it hasn't scrollbar on the left like TST but it seems that it's available in beta and should be included in new version.
So far I'm happy with it, I like how the text color on tabs is fading with time so you can see which tabs you visited recently.
Some browsers have side-tabs built in, but their implementation and/or UI is poor.
Other browsers can't do side-tabs at all, even with extensions.
Firefox is the only browser that allows extensions to do tabs on the side properly.
And I've tried all of the extensions. Sidebery is the best presently, and the best so far.
In my case, I feel the opposite. Having the tabs on the side interrupts the browsing experience and annoys me. I personally do two things that probably makes it easier to live with horizontal tabs:
1. I habitually close tabs. If I'm at 10+, I'll quickly scan them and throw any that I might need later into the bookmark bar (if they aren't in a folder, it triggers me to check them again soon-ish). Then I just purge all tabs because having more than 10 is just a cluttered mess. This is also true in JetBrains, iTerm, Sublime, Finder, etc.
2. I don't fullscreen my browser. It usually only uses about 80% of my screen width, sometimes less. That provides much less incentive to use side tabs