Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Tbh I disagree, the official vertical tab support is so nice and less janky than any of the extensions I used that had this functionality

After opening FF while previously using Arc for a while I was super happy with the usability improvements (that don’t seem to have impacted older workflows fortunately… big fan of how FF makes it easy to customize the toolbar etc)

View on HN

I tried Tree-style tabs and Sidebery, and I bounced off of both. The new native vertical tabs feature works for me, and it is the most impactful feature they've shipped in years for my particular firefox experience.

I kind of prefer TST since it's tree style. The native vertical tabs is flat, but I would like to organize my tabs more hierarchically.

yeah i'm hoping it can be enhanced with nesting.

What do you like about the native vertical tabs which was not present in tree style tabs or Sidebery?

To me, what they shipped seemed lacking in features to both, with no real improvements.

Back when I tried sidebery, there was some weird issue where either shift-click or right clicking didn't work on mac, and that turned me off. I just tried it again, and both work fine now.

One other feature that is nice for me is the ability to collapse the sidebar to just the tab icons. It's a nice middle ground between being able to see what I have open and getting a full screen experience.

TST and Sidebery are both fantastic extensions, I don't think they do anything wrong. For whatever reason though, the FF native implementation worked for me where they didn't

The biggest benefit I've seen is that it automatically hides the old tab bar at the top. Before that, you had to dig into some hidden profile directory and modify some userchrome CSS file and modify the CSS directly hoping it would work.

I use this method personally and it works great on GNOME and KDE. First set `toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets` to true in `about:config` then find your profile directory in `about:profiles`.

    cd $FIREFOX_PROFILE_DIR
    cd chrome
    git clone https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks
    touch userChrome.css

The contents of userChrome.css should be:

    @import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/hide_tabs_toolbar.css');
    @import url('firefox-csshacks/chrome/window_control_placeholder_support.css');

Then restart the browser. If anything breaks the repository will likely be updated soon and you just have to pull the changes.

Collapsed icon view is a major improvement over Sidebery and the reason I've switched for now.

what happened with sidebery? I've used it a couple of years now with zero problems.

I've tried the new vertical tabs and I'm not a fan, it's very primitive compared to my favorite vertical tab extension Sideberry.

I'll wager most users are happy with primitive over advanced.

For example, I sometimes run with hundreds of tabs and my wife has many thousands, at all times. My needs and hers are very different from typical users who have single digits numbers of tabs open, heavily biased toward the low end.

Of course I would prefer TST or Sideberry, but I'm not like most users. For most users, the Firefox experience is superior to Sideberry for its ease of use and fewer failure modes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com