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Comment by Kim_Bruning | Hacker News Reader

Already using Tree Style Tabs. It's the one critical plugin I need. I still don't understand how anyone works without it.

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It is particularly bizarre to me that the tab bar is horizontal on browsers. We switched to wide screen monitors close to 20 years ago, then stubbornly continued to waste vertical real estate for UI elements. Then webpages all went hard on mobile oriented designs and literally throw away the extra horizontal space by forcing portrait layouts. Yet we still use horizontal bars that make it hard to display tab titles and can't show more than a handful of tabs without a scrollbar showing up.

I do a decent amount of front-end work, so I'll have a browser and code editor side-by side on a 29in monitor. In this situation, I very much prefer horizontal tabs. So that's one use case.

Exactly this. Plus, I rarely have over 20 tabs and even when I'm close to that number I mainly use the 10 first ones. Vertical tabs is a cool feature but both modes are useful depending your needs.

Firefox has supported vertical tabs for the last year or so.

I guess it's just habit for me. I like having navigation on top, content in the middle, and OS operations on the bottom. The space was never much of a concern because

1. vertical content is scrollable anyway. if I lose a little space it's 1% more scrolling

2. if I do need the real estate it's one hotkey away. That's how Tree Tabs works, anyway. Use F1 to bring up the hierarchy and then hide it when unnedded

Both FF and Chrome (or anyways, at least Edge) have vertical tabs already. One of the better novel features that browsers have.

The same. Sometimes I pair with people working (programming) and having dozens of tabs open without any vertical tabs plugin. They pretty much have to spend time clicking and searching tab by tab what they need.

I don't get why vertical tab is not at least an option in all browsers.

TIL that Firefox gained native vertical tabs recently!

It's in the General section of Settings.

I wish there were better coupling between TST and STG (Simple Tab Groups). Automatic nesting of TST is great, but sometimes I'd like to just move a whole tree into a named group. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong.

https://github.com/piroor/tst-more-tree-commands gives you folders and a few extra commands (for which you can configure shortcuts, in about:addons - manage extension shortcuts)

FYI. Firefox supports vertical tabs natively now.

Tree style is better, it gives you a visual hierarchy of where each tab has come from. Makes Wikipedia rabbit holes more interesting.

Yes, I wish the native vertical tabs gave that same hierarchy. I will keep using Tree Style Tabs until it does.

Also Edge. One of the reasons I switched from Chrome.

Personally, it's easy for me. If I get above 10 tabs, I just close them all. I don't see any value in having more than that and they just become a distraction for me. Tree style, sidebar tabs, tab groups, etc. are just overkill for me.

I'm in this boat as well. From my perspective, I'd only bother keeping a tab open for a long period of time if it meets the following criteria:

1) It's something I'd actually want to go and view later (most stuff fails this criteria)

2) It's not something I can easily find again

3) It's something that I only anticipate going back to a couple of times, and thus isn't worth making into a bookmark

And over all my years browsing the web, almost nothing satisfies all that criteria. I'm pretty aggressive with closing tabs, and I almost never regret closing a tab.

That's just not how some people browse. When I hit HN's frontpage, I open every thread with an interesting headline in a new tab (within the HN tree.) Then I visit them one by one, and at least each one gets another tab opened (for the article.) The article may get multiple tabs opened if it has references or links that are interesting. If there's something that I want to get back to later, or don't have time to read now but looks interesting, it stays open. If I won't get to it for a while (before the next time I return to HN) it gets pulled out of the HN tree into its own tree.

  HN frontpage
  |> Interesting thread
  .|> Interesting article
  ..|> Interesting link from article 1
  ..|> Interesting link from article 2
  .|> Link from interesting thread.
  |> Interesting thread
  |> Interesting thread
  |> Interesting thread
  |> Interesting thread

Things that get moved out of tree I might get back to in an hour or a year.

If I'm at Amazon trying to buy a spatula, I have 10 different Amazon spatula pages open, and also three articles about spatulas within the tab tree.

I dunno. When I go to a bookstore, I don't buy one book, go home, then come back and buy another book. I browse the bookstore, buy everything that I want, and I put most of them on a shelf while I read one. I do not find the shelf a distraction.

And with some chrome.css changes you can make the sidebar hide until the mouse hovers over it.

https://imgur.com/a/SsKe3UC

please do share how you do it :)

Add this to your UserChrome.css for the FireFox profile you use.

      @namespace url("http://www.mozilla.org/keymaster/gatekeeper/there.is.only.xul");
      #TabsToolbar {
          visibility: collapse !important;
      }

      #sidebar-box {
        --bar-width: 40px;
        position: relative !important;
        overflow-x: hidden !important;
        /\* margin-right: calc(10px \* -1) !important; */
        /* left: var(--bar-width) !important; */
        min-width: var(--bar-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--bar-width) !important;
        border-right: 1px solid var(--sidebar-border-color);
        z-index: 3;
        transition: all 0.1s;
     }

     #sidebar-box:hover {
        --expanded-width: 250px;
        margin-right: calc(
           calc(var(--expanded-width) - var(--bar-width)) * -1
  ) !important;
        /\* left: var(--expanded-width) !important; */
        min-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
     }

     #sidebar-box:hover #sidebar-header {
        min-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
        max-width: var(--expanded-width) !important;
     }

    /* #sidebar-header is hidden by default, change "none"

to "inherit" to restore it. / #sidebar-header { min-width: var(--bar-width) !important; max-width: var(--bar-width) !important; overflow: hidden !important; }
/* #sidebar-splitter styles the divider between the sidebar and the rest of the browser. \*/ #sidebar-splitter { display: none; }
You might have to create that file in a Chrome folder in your profile folder if it doesnt exist. i.e.:
.mozilla/firefox/<your-profile-folder>/chrome/userChrome.css
you can find the right folder by going to about:support in the url bar and clicking on Open Directory in the page that shows in the Application Basics grid. This works for me on Ubuntu on FF 137.0.2

Very interesting plugin, I will need to review it sometime soon

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