Hacker News Reader

Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) vertical tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with so many open tabs at once.

I have maybe max 20 tabs open at any given time. When I'm done with $TASK I close all the tabs (save 2-3 that remain open and pinned, mail, calendar, etc). The tab bar is like my stack. I only fill it up for the task at hand, then clear the stack and move on when done. If there are things I need to come back to, I use bookmarks.

Vertical tabs and the browser's bookmarks manager are just too similar for me to want to use tabs over bookmarks. Especially considering a crash can wipe all open tabs.

I am glad the browser gives me this option as a setting. And a browser that forces vertical tabs on me will probably lose me as a user for life.

Also:

> since I imagine Safari/Chrome/Edge don't let you make that kind of modification?

MS Edge supports vertical tabs out of the box. Brave also, but I can't comment on the rest in your list.

I feel the same way. Keep limited tabs open most of the time.

But the advantage to vertical and nested tabs is that when I need to open a dozen links (like grabbing interesting links from a page without stopping mid flow) I can do it without having to ruin my environment. The tabs are there ready to be consumed: nicely nested below the source tab. Doing that with a horizontal tab bar would destroy my productivity until I closed all of those tabs. It allows you to switch tasks.

As far as wasted space… I hardly ever use a laptop screen. Text content is ideal at 70ch? That’s like a 1/3rd of a 27” monitor.

You wouldn't be having this argument if you could put your tabs on any edge you wanted to, at any time, even using multiple edges of you run out of space along one edge.

It's an entirely artificial argument that doesn't address the real problem: incompetent UI designers preemptively and inflexibly making that decision for all users in all situation, and forcing everyone to use one edge or the other instead of any or all, therefore squandering 3/4 of the usable perimeter.

Look at Mozilla telemetry and you'll see most people have a few tabs open, and overwhelmingly most people's tabs all fit in the horizontal bar with no scrolling. People with more tabs than that are a low single digit percentage.

20 vertical tabs would be a lot more readable and distinguishable from one another than 20 horizontal tabs.

Sure it makes it more manageable to treat them like temporary bookmarks (guilty!) but you don't have to, that's not why I like them.

I know edge at least supports vertical tabs? I don't like them though (I don't have enough horizontal screen space, plus it doesn't free up the top bar space). If I start to have many open tabs I start cutting them down anyway.

Fair enough not having the horizontal space for it. It's usually still the opposite that annoys me (small centred content not making use of space) but of course this depends on zoom level etc. too.

I'm not sure what you mean about not freeing the top bar though? The topmost thing I have is the back/forward/refresh/URL/extensions/menu bar. (file/edit/view/etc. hidden unless I press Alt, but that's not where tabs would be I don't think.)

The space where tabs go (when horizontal) isn't removed in vertical tabs mode. So using vertical tabs doesn't save any extra on vertical space, only uses additional horizontal space.

Well what I'm saying is I don't have it, so either Sidebery handles it or I put something in userChrome, but either way it's something I have not had to think about in all the years I've been using vertical tabs, such that I was not aware of the issue.

edit: the latter (or Sidebery does do it but my previous solution didn't and this is now redundant, I suppose), I have:

    #TabsToolbar {
      visibility: collapse;
    }

    #sidebar-header {
      display: none;
    }

(~/.config/mozilla/firefox/profile/chrome/userChrome.css)

So you're shocked every time you see a browser with default UI setup? I mean, I understand if it's not your preference, or even have good argumentation for why the default is not the best for everyone. But if you're shocked every time you see people use a default setting that isn't your preference, your life must be pretty shocking.

I find that having a huge sidebar shifts the content off-center in a really uncomfortable way.

Aren't you currently on a site where most of the content is more off-centre, and having a left sidebar would actually put it more in front of you?

I can sort of sympathise, I'm fairly 'OCD' (not actually, but as people say) about similar things, but it's never bothered me I don't think. Maybe try with it a bit smaller? I don't think mine's 'huge' - maybe a bit wider than single horizontally displayed tab would be (just as my choice for the length of title it allows me to read), a couple of inches on a 24"-diagonal monitor.

There's userChrome modifications that make Firefox's sidebar collapsible, expands on mouseover and covers the page instead of pushing the page aside. I use that with TreeStyleTabs. Mine when collapsed is only ~3 favicons in width.

My userChrome tweaks for vertical tabs: https://gist.github.com/aclarknexient/88673880d373864eee1927...

Includes screenshots! :)

Most users, like 90% or more have tabs that all fit visibly in the horizontal space. Look it up. Mozilla's telemetry is public. 5 or 6 tabs fit just fine and in a sidebar are hugely wasteful of pixels. You think everyone browses just like you so you can't imagine why the browser is shaped for people not like you but your browsing habits are in the ultra-minority. Take a look at the telemetry before making silly posts like this.

Most users also don't actually need modern processors.

Most drivers don't need to pull a trailer.

Most people don't need a wheelchair ramp.

Still arguing for stopping processor development, removing the possibility to use towing hitches and removing wheelchair ramps isn't something I hear people argue for.

It is almost like in other areas of life we accept that different people have different needs and wishes, but in software everything needs to be pixel perfect the way the designers envisioned it.

Why?

products are shaped for an audience and audiences use products that work for them.you're free to cater to least users, but successful people cater to most users.

Here's the thing:

Firefox was very usable for most users even when it had real extensions.

The extension API didn't affect end users at all.

It feels like a war against power users, were designers want to take away control from us to make sure it always looks like they intended.

> sidebar are hugely wasteful of pixels

You know what is also a waste of pixels? Websites pretending they are mobile view only on my 4K desktop monitor in landscape. Blogs, new Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, news sites, whatever else.

The vertical tabs wouldn't hurt that shit at all.

And if the vertical tabs would be a first class citizen in a browser it would greatly help so if needed I could have switch to it.

> I recommend Sidebery

I've seen several people mention this addon. Can you (or someone using it) give a reason or two to prefer it over the standard alternatives (e.g. Tree Style Tab)?

I already mentioned 'panels' and container integration.

Idk, I don't know why Tree Style Tab is any more 'standard alternative' (or certainly not that any others are, afaict TST & Sidebery are the most popular two) - they're both extremely popular (Mozilla gives 196k users of TST & 75k of Sidebery; nothing else close) and both 'Recommended' by Mozilla.

Use whatever you want, I did say more than that I just recommend using something to get vertically listed tabs. The tree-ing is a much less big deal to me tbh, though Sidebery does do that too fwiw.

Safari has a side bar where tabs are in fact vertical. Tab groups will also let you, um, group tabs, and they're presented as a tree in the sidebar.

Edge has vertical tabs out of the box. And yeah we get it, because vertical tabs people and tree tabs people are the vegans of browser discussions. Please, we get that you like vertical tabs. No need to keep going on about it.

Please, don't perpetuate the myth that vegans "keep going on about things" unless you've seen someone do it in real life.

I have.

Most vegans I know use Edge.

'unless you've seen someone' is not a good standard to use here, because of course some people are like that, that's where the stereotype comes from - but the vegans who don't 'keep going on about it' are inherently not as visible: it's not often you'll know someone is a vegan and not talking about it, essentially never for strangers.

So if you really care about reasoning with people to challenge the stereotype, you need to know % vegans (according to some survey or whatever) in a population relevant to a person so that you can ask them to consider not if they've ever seen one vegan talk about it, but if they've seen a number X close to that % of the total people they've seen talk about it (and if not that they've encountered that-X% extra vegans without realising it).

I use tree style tabs btw