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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

I was really enjoying tree tabs and panels of the Arc browser [0] but decided to rollback to firefox so I could have something cross platform. Sidebery lets me do nested tab groups, tab panels, plus its got my bookmarks as a panel too. Performance so far is really good, with ~50 tabs anyway.

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...

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Add this to userChrome and you can also hide the giant Sidebery header on the sidebar that Firefox otherwise forces:

    #sidebar-box #sidebar-header {
      display: none !important;
    }

danke!

i suppose sideberry does not open by default on private windows, can that be fixed somehow to auto load?

Just go to settings for the extension, and tick the box to allow it?

i am not finding it

OK, here goes. I'm on Linux; location of the settings menu may differ, depending on what you use.

- 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!

i have that. i know about that and that is not my question.

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

Ah, OK. I would just hit ctrl-e and move on, but that's just me.

It’s baffling that Firefox doesn’t offer a built in option to disable that sidebar header.

Firefox assumes you may have multiple sidebar extensions installed and may need to actively switch between them. Given the sidebar itself is the vestigial home of Firefox's original bookmarks and history panels, many decades ago, before those got newer windows/pages, that assumption isn't necessarily wrong. There were years you could have a bunch of stuff in the sidebar. It is only now that most of that stuff is gone and people are only using the sidebar extension point for this one singular use case (vertical tabs) that the extension/app/page switching header feels redundant and unnecessary.

I have a thousand github tabs open, that I'm not sure how to file. I use sideberry and other extensions to manage tabs and close them when I need to. Sideberry is the only somewhat efficient(fast) way to quickly search and close tabs. I'm been waiting for the v5 release for a long time. There was something I needed from it, but I don't remember right now.

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.

[1] https://github.com/blackhole89/rofi-tab-switcher

[2] https://github.com/balta2ar/brotab

Most likely i just have different habits, but I never really understood how people can cope with such a massive amount of tabs. I genuinely enjoy closing my browser after each day (or maybe just before a break) and starting with a fresh session, no saved sessions for me. For me this has three main benefits

- 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.

> My Attention is directed

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.

> Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.

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).

I just don’t want the hassle of managing bookmarks for all except those I want to keep long-term, mainly. Every browser’s bookmark management is higher friction than its tab management.

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.

I use tridactyl's tab command to switch between tabs, it's great.

https://tridactyl.xyz/build/static/docs/modules/_src_excmds_...

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