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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

> You can totally still stick with Firefox… but remember to download userChrome.css from GitHub. And if you want vertical tabs, be sure to install Sidebery until Mozilla get around to implementing native vertical tabs.

I'm a constant critic of most things Mozilla (as well as an avid Firefox user... there's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram) and most of what this intro rails against resonates, but I'll never understand why they get hammered for not implementing vertical tabs.

This is a feature that a small but passionate subset of their users use, but it's also a feature that already has an extension that said subset of their users uses. Further, said subset has a strong overlap with the never-Chromium crowd, so they're not going to lose them any time soon. Out of the thousand and one things that Mozilla could be doing to make Firefox more competitive, vertical tabs is solidly in the second half of the list.

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I'd be fine with letting an extension take over that niche ... if they made an API that let it replace the horizontal tabs instead of only being able to duplicate the tabs in the sidebar. Or even a way to configure that as a user.

That is how tree style tabs worked before Firefox switched to webextensions. And when Firefox switched to the we extensions API, a ticket was immediately opened requesting an API allowing hiding the horizontal tab bar. But despite some initial interest, nothing really ever happened with that.

It's not an api, but just in case people don't know... It is possible to hide the horizontal tabs via userChrome.

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

Hmm but I don't want to use vertical tabs in every window. Only some of them, in the others (with few tabs and narrower 4:3 displays) i want horizontal. If I hide it in userchrome I end up with no tab bar in those cases.

Yep. While Sidebery, TST, etc have done about as well as they can given the limitations of extensions, the resulting vertical tab experience is half-baked without userChrome mods. It's also still kinda janky even with the mods unless one spends time polishing out all the edge cases, but then there's a high chance the mods will randomly break in weird ways after an update one day. There's real value in having the feature be native.

Native vertical tabs are already in nightly and it's about as neutered as its Edge and Vivaldi counterparts. What Edge and Vivaldi does not have is APIs for implementing something as impressive as the nested style Sidebery or Tree Style Tabs.

Making it sound like Edge and Vivaldi has the upper hand, when it comes to vertical tabs, is not fair.

Edge and Safari have had vertical tabs for years; when the default browsers on Windows and macOS offer that affordance, it becomes more of a mainstream parity issue. Which is thankfully, finally, being addressed.

I think it's fair to count at least a subset of Arc users in the "wants vertical tabs" camp. I have several friends and co-workers who use it now, and most of them mentioned vertical tabs at least once.

I agree that it's probably still an 'enthusiast' feature, but it's one that I think is starting to catch the road and has a pretty solid future trajectory.

In my experience, once people see how sidebar/vertical tabs work, they're a lot more interested. Most folks I've talked about this with have not even known there was an alternative. After someone has been shown how to change between tab layouts, they mostly stick to sidebar/vertical tabs.

Maybe I should have tried plain vertical tabs—I tried out tree-style tabs and kind of hated it, so I went back to horizontal.

Regardless, the question isn't really whether vertical tabs would be a useful feature, it's whether it would be the most useful thing Mozilla could be working on.

I'd much rather see them pour resources into making Firefox's devtools the best again. I'm pretty much the lone pure-Firefox holdout among my coworkers, with everyone else at least switching into Chrome for serious devtools work, and most now run it all the time. Make Firefox the best for devtools and you ensure it has reliable support across all browsers and put it back in the hands of the biggest browser-evangelists.

Purely out of curiosity, what did you prefer about horizontal tabs, and what did you dislike about vertical tabs?

I use two side-by-side browser windows, so there's no room for a sidebar.

Not a big fan of having such core functionality in extensions. Firefox translations work better now that they're in the core and it keeps the number of extensions down (and thus the messages of "Firefox is.. starting.. slowly")

The same with the AI stuff, i don't mind that in the browser. It does an okay job though it needs a lot of work. And I can already use it with my local AI server. Unlike the copilot crap in edge and whatever AI Google has in Chrome (I've not used chrome in years, only chromium)

Well, the entry barrier is higher than simply installing an extension. You also need to change the userChrome.ccs (if I remember the file correctly), to get rid of the horizontal tabs.

For a base/intermediate user, that's not a simple thing to do.

Because Edge, Brave and Vivaldi has GOOD vertical tabs and they made it native somehow so much be a very small userbase right??? :)

ALSO it is now native in Nightly anyway, so we won and it is good. :)

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