Tabs at the top is wasted space, I much prefer my tabs on the side instead, as most web content is taller than it is wide, and I have a widescreen monitor. I understand the choice of tabs on top when 640x480 was the most common resolution, but for desktop usage today? Tabs on top seems like an outdated layout choice.
And unless you have a browser full of tabs, vertical tab lists usually have massive amounts of purely wasted white space and are generally much less space efficient overall.
Every once in a while I wouldn't mind for a specific window to have vertical tabs with nested tabs, as a psuedo live-bookmark organization system for a current project. But it's not a daily driver for me.
Are you kidding? I'm willing to bet 99% of users run their browsers fullscreen.
Using the drag-and-drop feature that splits the screen between two GUIs already marks the office power user, a third windows on a single screen brings us into the territory of the hardcore nerds running tiling window managers.
I've never had my browser in fullscreen unless it's media content.
I too prefer tabs at top than to the side, as I have four screens, 2x32' and 2x27' -- having the tabs at the top of my top screen feels more natural.
99% of the folks I interact with usually just use whatever size the browser opens in initially, then maybe resize it if they're reading for a while, or need to see more info. If half a pic shows up, they might try to fumble to grab a handle to resize to see more of the pic; sometimes it works, sometimes they end up giving up.
Going 'full screen' may be different than just 'as wide and tall as the monitor', because 'full screen' mode gets rid of the window chrome, which causes confusion.
The only folks I know who consistently use browsers 'full screen' are on mobile devices where that's generally the only option.
I have a 27" widescreen. The idea of maximizing a browser window is absurdity. My monitor can comfortably show three websites side by side. The amount of wasted white space on a full screen website would approach 90%.
Here's this very post fullscreened (without a taskbar). What a wild waste of space and the content is clearly not designed to be viewed like this, with the UX being located at the top left lol.
What does having 60% of my screen be purple do for me? Why would you choose that?
Honestly, man I don't care for this conversation. You do you bae. I was merely offering an observation of what I've seen from people and you're not even talking about that.
Do you mean maximized? I might agree if you do. I almost never see browsers full screen except when playing videos.
I have no idea what the statistics are, but I certainly never run the browser fullscreen and I rarely see others do so.
The only time I run an app without fullscreen-ing it is if I don't have to do much in it or it doesn't have enough content to use up all the space anyways. Like system settings. Otherwise, I am using the app -> I am focusing on it -> I want it to take all the space it wants and show me everything going on inside it. My browser and my text editor are apps where I spend 99% of my time so they are always full screen.
The only thing it's not really good for is the email client, video, and pictures. For those I have another monitor in the standard landscape configuration.
I suppose just as wide 16:9 display would have been even nicer, but it's fine. There are some benefits in window placement in having just a single screen, even if window managers could work better for this use (e.g. have a "second screen" region where there are separate workspaces).
(I've never had overlapping windows in my life -- I find seeing more than one thing super distracting and it annoys me that this seems to be the default on Macs)
javascript:var%20b=document.documentElement;b.style.width='900px';b.style.marginLeft='auto';b.style.marginRight='auto';void(0)
The Firefox and Edge implementations have a collapsible panel for the vertical tabs. I agree if they didn't, it would be worse than horizontal tabs.
However, my pet peeve is that it's now impossible to disable tabs altogether, say when using a tiling WM that implements tabbing itself, controllable with the usual shortcuts. Firefox has an extension that always moves tabs to a separate window, but it's janky.
Yeah, being able to do that would be really nice.
So I think it's reasonably easy to see that this is not and was never the actual driver behind this decision. It's completely retconned.
Widescreen monitors afford that wasting of space better.
[0] http://www.onenotegem.com/uploads/allimg/191124/12310QH9-3.g...
But, I do agree that this was likely never the driver. In fact, I've always thought the "obvious" explanation is simply that window controls and title bars are at the top, and since tabs are like nested windows inside a window, they would follow basically the same patterns...
It's too bad I'll have to dump Vivaldi soon, now that Google is killing adblockers.
Side note: it infuriates me that Microsoft’s web-Office will “helpfully” remind me that it auto saves when I do Cmd+s but also captures the event so that Arc can’t handle it. Which reminds me…I can probably whip up a quick Boost to get rid of that - yay rubber ducking in the comments!
TBH in general I find tabs less useful as they multiply. Most of the time I just Cmd+A in chrome to search for the tab I need.
Now it’s all micro transactions so an MBA doesn’t have to work anymore.
Now those are power user and dev tools and users get what they decided was the just right info dense or sparse design.
What I want on an ultrawide isn't what I want on a portrait 16:9 side monitor.
Even on large monitors you'd be surprised the number of people at 150% zoom with small windows opened instead of fullscreen.
Not if your screen is in portrait orientation.
But that wasn't the point of the person you are responding to anyway. The point is all the empty wasted space that was above the tabs before it was removed and the tabs moved to the top.
Vivaldi & Floorp offer this through being highly customizable but they tend to have cracks around the edges of their use for the same reason.
I was first introduced to this with a Chrome flag back in 2011 https://www.askvg.com/how-to-enable-new-compact-navigation-f... but they ended up backing out for various reasons (the largest of which was probably the specific design used a pop-down url bar which went over the page area, so could be spoofed).
In 2021 Safari became the largest browser I've seen roll this out as a 1st party feature to general users, but it faced some backlash https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-get-more-space-in-safar... I'm not a big fan of their particular styling choices but the layout was pretty decent.
This is one of the things I love about my Emacs config. I just hit a key to get things like buffers or file trees up when I need them, then they disappear.
I'd love to have a keyboard driven browser but whenever I've tried I always end up with one hand on the mouse anyway so it doesn't work.
Also, if vertical screen estate is a concern, just turn your monitor 90° A lot of professionals working with paper sized documents (legal, bookkeeping, administration) do this.
As a software engineer, I've tried it, but I prefer splitting windows (tiling, or panes or such) horizontally. So my estate is limited in width more than in height.
At 640x480 resolution, the toolbar was tiny but powerful.
Now at 1920x1080 resolution the toolbar is relatively huge and dumbed down.
All the benefits of higher resolutions and larger monitors have been lost on stupid UI trends.
It is changeable. With enough dedication you can go a long way just with CSS.
In this case it is even rather easy because the "unified toolbar" the thing containing the search box, the menu bar (if shown) and the tab bar are three elements in the same flex box. They can be reordered by setting the order property.
Only downside in this case is that (if client side decoration is not disabled in the settings) the window buttons (close, minimize) are also part of the unified toolbar and would end (without further fixes) below the tab bar.
As a quick (and dirty) experiment I moved the tab bar left to the search bar in the same row just with:
#titlebar {
flex-direction: row;
> unified-toolbar { order: 2; width: 50vw; }
#tabs-toolbar { order: 1; width: 50vw; }
}
Finally Thunderbird's own customization dialog can be used to fill the empty space around the search bar. By default it has a spacer left and right but that is easy to change even without custom CSS.
hell no. I want the title bar, the scrollbars and the window border back. I work with more than one window.
While that does speak to the strength of TB’s Quick filters it’s also an indictment of its search
>> How would that look like?
I wouldn't describe it as a hack, it uses the references in the messages themselves, as long as they are accurate it will work perfectly. This is the same way, Thunderbird knows if you have replied/forwarded messages.
> you actually see your own response
I do see the response, why wouldn't I that's what the feature is for. Not sure if there is a bug for you.
Not sure what you mean by that you see your own response. In the current "conversation" (thread) view the chain will only display incoming answers, but never your own outgoing emails – which well... would make it a true conversation view.
It absolutely displays outgoing mails, that's what I was saying. It hasn't ocurred to me that it potentially couldn't, then it would be kind of worthless. Not sure why you have this bug, but that isn't normal, maybe you can report it?
What is still missing now (even if or when it works), is a continous display for me. Currently you have to go email by email, which can be a bit cumbersome to navigate, because then you'll never get the "full picture" for a quick glance, if you get my drift.
Yes that might be useful. I do generally have the whole history in every message since it is added automatically, when replying so you can reply inline. Maybe some client don't do that though.