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Comment by osbulbul | Hacker News Reader

I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and split view. I am really tired of resource hog, unstable arc. Want to return back to traditional browsers but they are not supporting vertical tabs like arc did. And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.

So we are lonely in the dark :)

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Most browsers except Chrome have some sort of vertical tabs support.

- Safari (Mac) has a vertical tabs, but a very confusing UI, mixing Profiles, Windows and Tab Groups (only 1 level).

- Edge has Workspaces and Vertical Tabs, along with Groups (only 1 level).

- Chrome does not have vertical tabs and has 1 level groups

- Vivaldi has vertical tabs and groups, not sure how many levels of grouping.

- Firefox has Containers and Vertical Tabs (today), but for best results you still need something like Tab Stash, Sideberry or TST.

- Orion Browser (Mac) has the best UI imho and allows for grouping tabs at as many levels as you want, but you cannot have proper "folders", only nested tabs.

- Arc gets everything right, in my opinion, but I do not specially care much for the candy UI.

I'm surprised that none of them support tree hierarchies (like tree style tabs / sideberry), which IMO is the reason to use 'vertical tabs' in the first place.

I believe it’s likely due to usability issues on increasingly common small laptop screens. On a 12/13” screen for example hierarchal sidebars become a truncated mess after only 1-2 levels of nesting unless the sidebar is expanded and eating up valuable main content space.

Personally even 1-level vertical tabs are valuable because labels don’t get truncated or hidden nearly as badly as they do with traditional tabs, plus vertical scrolling is more natural and effortless than horizontal is. Additionally, most screens these days have tons of width while height is at a premium, and vertical tabs takes advantage of that.

Orion browser does, all natively.

Actually somehow Safari has fastest load times, it just feel faster than anything. But man, I think it has ugliest UI :( I want to use Safari inside arc UI

> Actually somehow Safari has fastest load times, it just feel faster than anything

I guess that's easier when you only care about one platform, and everything that comes with it.

I wonder how fast you could make a browser if you don't make it cross-platform and only support usage on Linux for example. What things could you do if you don't care about cross-platform support?

Linux WebKit browsers are pretty snappy too. I think it just boils down to what each browser/engine team prioritizes.

IIRC very early versions of Chrome actually had native vertical tabs and then they removed the feature at some point.

Edge even has vertical tabs now. There are always add-ons, but I agree this should he a first class feature in all browsers.

The annoying thing about the vertical tabs in Edge is that Microsoft eliminated the vertical taskbar option in Windows 11. One step forward and two steps back.

Being forced to use Edge on my work laptop is how I found out about vertical tabs, they're so much easier to use for me.

Why is having a vertical option for the taskbar not on Win11? That sounds like one of the easiest features to port over.

> And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.

I really, really don't understand the hype around Arc. I tried it for a while and just wasn't at all impressed. I've heard, though, that a lot of people praise how it help them deal with hundreds of tabs, and I don't keep my tabs open, so maybe I'm the wrong audience?

(This is ignoring the fact that I tried it again a month ago and it wouldn't load a single page. I emailed their help and never heard from them, so I guess that's my last try for a while.)

I heard similar things from different people, so looks like it's not everyones taste. But you are right about arc's help is basically not working anymore.

You could check out Vivaldi. The split view is pretty robust. The Vertical tabs can be on left or right, and allow one level of tab grouping.

I think I only didn't try Vivaldi :) thanks, I will definitely look

I really, really want to like Vivaldi, but it's just so slow for me on Windows. It has a similar problem on Linux, though a restart a few times a day solves it.

Yeah, performance is its biggest downside.

Is it slow with a fresh profile? It can become suprisingly slow as session files grow, but cleaning it can revert some of that

Yeah. I found out that a Tabs > Memory Saver setting was disabled. Once I enabled that, the performance improved somewhat.

Brave has vertical tabs, and a helpful grouping feature. Highly recommend.

Workplace had me move from Brave to Chrome and I was surprised that Chrome didn't have this feature. Brave's implementation felt like it was already a native part of Chromium, I guess they took existing parts and re-oriented it as I was surprised to learn there wasn't some experimental flag to enable it in Chrome either.

???

Edge, Brave, Vivaldi have native vertical tabs built in.

Firefox now too.

Opera Presto was first way before them all.

Why are you and another comment mention some no-name flashy browser?

Edge is stable and has vertical tabs and split view support.

Dude, I cannot use a Microsoft product even if it has the functionality I prefer.

Well, that's your problem, dude. :)

> I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and split view.

I wish UI toolkits just came fully loaded and let me spin views and panels and anything in any which way I liked.

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