Hacker News Reader

Comment by phartenfeller | Hacker News Reader

A screenshot of how it looks would have been helpful. I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

View on HN

> I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

It's funny how we've gone full cycle. Early versions of Firefox get vertical tabs because the plugin system is very rich and you could do whatever you wanted with XUL. Firefox quantum comes around and kills XUL based extensions, vertical tabs are dead. Arc revives an ancient idea as something new and hip, firefox "responds" by reviving the very thing they killed.

AFAIK, Tree Style Tab still exists?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

It does, but you have to have some custom CSS to turn off the normal horizontal tabs, and you have to go and enable some options in about:config to even have custom CSS.

I've got something that works reasonably well, but it's really hard to have CSS that always works correctly.

The original XUL-based vertical tabs actually moved and restyled Firefox's native tabs, instead of creating a lookalike (which is all that's possible now). This meant that unrelated addons that did things like grey-out unloaded tabs, or alter the favicons to have some sort of indicator, still worked on the vertical tabs. The current vertical tabs addons all have to do it themselves or add some sort of API for the other addons to interact with to get the same effect.

> the plugin system is very rich

- like mplayer or vlc plugins to play every video format independently of browsers licence - right ?

> you could do whatever you wanted with XUL

- except undoing it (restartless extensions) - but you could do better without it anyway.. (XBL was to powerfull idea ;)

.. except since you couldn't hook in early enough to replace some XPCOM pieces before they are cached.. anymore.. RIP Firefox.

Arc is much more than that, though.

1st. Tabs are both tabs and bookmarks. They exist to be more or less persistent (as long as you add them to folders - I get it, it's not everyone's workflow, but for people like me, it's a blessing).

2nd. It has a brilliant tab sync between devices. Something Firefox doesn't do - in fact, only Edge does that.

3rd. Is much lighter on resources on macOS. Some months ago I decided to give a - yet another - try at Firefox on my MacBook and I started not being able to do my full work day job on battery. At first, I didn't understand what was going on and thought it was docker that was killing the battery. Then I went to investigate, and yup, it was Firefox, again, after all these years of telling that now they are good on macOS. No, they aren't, they still use 4x more battery than Edge, or Arc, or Brave...

TLDR: Give Arc a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.

You can open tabs from other devices in Firefox. They don't open automatically though, presumably because some people (i.e. myself) would find that horrible.

Well, I find that seamless. I get to my desktop, and can continue working exactly in what I was doing in my laptop.

That, together with clearly defined workspaces, is fantastic for me.

Maybe (probably?), but back when I worked at Mozilla in ~2010 "Tree Style Tabs" was one of the most popular add-ons.

Here's a screenshot of what the feature looks like:

https://www.ghacks.net/2024/06/25/you-can-try-vertical-tabs-...

They unfortunately ruined TST with the switch to WebExtensions because it could no longer replace the top tab bar. There were hacks you could do by modifying something in your Firefox profile directory.

Bizarre to me that they didn't take TST's popularity as a hint of supporting vertical tabs as a native feature until almost 7 years later.

Compared to pushing and implementing CSS, JS and HTML standards, cryptography, APIs, mobile OS release cycles etc, I've always wondered whether vertical tabs would've been an easy win.

Yeah, I remember it being a huge internal argument against WebExtensions at the time. (But, security + easy of building + compatibility + speed of developing Firefox + a bunch of other things made the switch off XUL the right choice)

I want to say they actually put some work in to allow TST to still work when they transitioned to quantum as it was a popular extension.

I got the impression they were eventually going to add back in the horizontal tab bar disable as well but if that was even true they clearly forgot about it. I've been using the userChrome hacks for close to 7 years now.

>I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

What age are you?

How long have you been using computers?

Sorry to be this blunt, but I am asking as Firefox has had addons for vertical tabs for a long time.

Vivaldi, Edge, Brave all have vertical tabs.

Opera Presto was first.

Why even mention this Arc? I feel like you just jumped on some hype train and you have been using Google Chrome and just recently found out about vertical tabs. Good for you but it is not a new development.

Edge and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality before Arc even existed.

Firefox also had it via an extension.

...and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality before Edge even existed (and about six years before Edge implemented it).

The only other browser (to my knowledge) that had native tabs earlier than Vivaldi was the original Opera browser, which was eventually killed, which in turn led to people leaving the company and creating Vivaldi.

I still miss the flexibility of the originals Opera's UI. As well as the built-in email client.

https://imgur.com/a/HWaxm0P (from 2009)

It seems they took a cue from Arc for the pinned tabs icons. Now they only need to add tab groups a la Tab Stash, Sideberry or Tree Style Tab, and combine that with Sync. Still a lot of work ahead, but this looks very promising.

Kudos to the Firefox team.

Firefox for Android already has "Collections" of tabs. Maybe a starting point?

I use Edge for work and the vertical tabs with grouping works really nicely. On the other hand Arc's website made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Unfortunately it does indeed seem like that's what Firefox wants to ape.

I would imagine a minor browser would be less of an influence than the fact that most browsers have vertical tabs as an option at this point, or even just the slew of add-ons for Firefox itself.

Hadn't heard of Arc, went to download it just now, and...it requires an account to use? Really?

Browser UIs have barely evolved in the past decade so I guess I'm excited that Firefox is trying something new.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com