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Comment by tapoxi | Hacker News Reader

Did they ever add actual vertical tab support? When they migrated to webextensions TreeStyleTabs was pretty hamstrung because it couldn't replace the actual tab UI anymore.

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I've liked this. Started using this after I got hooked on vertical tabs in Edge at work. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

Yep! This and a few userchrome.css modifications is all it took for me. A few css transitions and hidden elements and viola, it functions better than edge does.

happen to have those css mods handy?

https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx

Yep! Here ya go https://pastebin.com/6fhmdaNQ

I've tried to comment things as I go. Hope you find it helpful!

Man this stuff really took me down a rabbit hole! Appreciate the link.

TST cannot but can be done via userChrome.css.

  #TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
  }

Can even be done to auto-hide only when having TST opened rather permanently.

How would you do that latter part? I currently have a userchrome.css for something similar but I wasn't aware that you could have conditionals in css.

Using a different size for elements matching a :hover selector is how a lot of CSS gets this done.

The first result on Google (https://gist.github.com/olmstadfm/d6b4d37219e957d9cdcdb3ec88...) also seems to employ the :hover selector to accomplish hiding the tabs. I don't know how effective this particular script is, but it makes sense to use such a system.

Haven't had a chance to implement it, but this sounds rad. I never thought to use hover in userchrome.css!

Brilliant! Thank you!

I don't know about TST, but sidebery can alter your window title when it's active, so you can match css rules against it.

    #main-window[titlepreface*="Sidebery"] #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse !important;
    }

Oh heck! That's rad. I'll have to play around with that. I use sidebery so this is aces. Thank you!

See here:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Tabs like History and Bookmarks won't hide but TST does.

Sidebery's wiki describes[0] a method using a window "title preface" API, then using that preface in CSS selectors.

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/wiki/Firefox-Styles-Snipp...

Wow, I should have read their wiki. Goldmine!

No, you still need to "hack" the tabbar away on your own. Back then the claim seems to be security-reasons, so no malicious addon can replace the tabbar for you, and manipulate what you see. Which seems fairs, removing the tabbar on your own is not very complicated.

And Tree Style Tabs still works very well today, the early bugs are all fixed now. In the meanwhile there appeared also some other vertical tabbars/trees, but none are really on TSTs level, so not sure how popular they are. So over all, there is little reason for Mozilla to bring a vertical tabbar on their own, especially as they are still missing support for a second sidebar.

I switched from TST to sidebery because TST was unbearably slow (about 3 years ago).

Did TST improve on this front?

I can't imagine TST being any faster than it is for me

How many tabs do you have open at the same time? I was at a few hundreds (with an auto-unload add on as well). I often get there while doing research on a new subject - open everything relevant as a tab, and slowly go through them.

(Yes, it’s a horrible workflow, but I haven’t found one that works better for me, or even remotely as well)

I don't know what's fast or slow is for you. But I can say in general I have no performance-problems with TST. I tested the new version of Sidebery, the last days, and performance-wise it seems around the same. Some difference is the animation-speed, which out of the box on TST is a bit slower than with Sidebery. But that's a configuration-detail.

Few hundred tabs on oldish hardware - it took about 100ms to open or close a tab without TST, and 1-5 seconds with TST.

You can always add vertical tab support. What you can't do is turn off the normal tabs across the top. So any side tab solution (I use TST) also needs some userChrome.css.

I am using https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery for this now.

I'd like to see that too, but even with Sidebery I have been using Safari more because of its tab groups (and I have found the extensions lacking). It seems Mozilla is not interested in that idea any more. Without tab groups, its a stark difference that feels like the olden days when you had IE (no tabs) and FF (tabs). You just can't go back if they are useful to you.

If you use my theme and set a few things, it looks pretty good.

- https://github.com/black7375/Firefox-UI-Fix/wiki/Show-Off-Yo...

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