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Comment by barbazoo | Hacker News Reader

I just can't go back to horizontal tabs anymore.

vertical tabs never really worked for me. What would you say are the biggest benefits for you?

Not the parent commenter but

1. Great if you have a wider screen (could never do it on my old 13" Macbook Air, for a 15" it's pretty good but for a 24" iMac it's perfect). But if you need the space youjust have it set to minimize by default, maximize on hover.

2. See the titles of your browser tabs, which is great when you are like me and never have fewer than 30 tabs open at once.

3. Easier to select browser tabs when you have many of them open (ie they don't get squished unreadably small)

I still use horizontal tabs, but have dabbled with vertical tabs. The biggest benefit I saw was that tab names stayed a consistent width and readable, no matter now many tabs I had open. With horizontal tabs, once you have over 10-15, you’re kind of flying blind.

Basically, it's easier to see tab titles when you have a LOT of tabs open.

They really only work if you have a large monitor. I use a 50" 4k TV and two other monitors, and a 15" laptop. When I'm on smaller screens I have to hide the tabs.

Your typical screen today is wider than most content on the web needs it to be, so most web pages render as tall columns with ample margins. Vertical tabs use up that space efficiently to show a large number of tabs in a way that makes it much easier to see all your tabs at a glance without losing track because the titles are shortened into nothing.

i can't wait for Safari to add proper horizontal tabs. There's a sidebar with tabs but you still have compact tabs taking up precious vertical space

They didn’t really take up any space in Sequoia, but Tahoe brought them back. I guess people didn’t like how Sequoia was doing things.

I find the Tahoe tab bar pretty ugly.

What are you using instead?

Probably Zen, as Arc is dead

Pretty sure both Firefox and Microsoft Edge both offer it as an option too.

Orion, too.

And Brave

Firefox's new implementation is subpar. You're better off using an add-on like Sidebery for more features, but you need custom user chrome CSS to hide the horizontal tabs.

Zen is lovely but I actually really miss the little arc window. Didn't realize how much I used it until it was gone. Sticking with Arc for now.

Arc works fine; Orion (Kagi's browser) is like an Arc built on WebKit.

I really don't see many similarities between Orion and Arc but I also didn't use Arc very much because I was pessimistic that it would stay free and consistently updated without annoying monetization features. I didn't expect them to switch to a brand new browser though lol.

Arc

Not OP, but I use vertical tabs with Vivaldi.

Pretty happy with it; I tried basically all browsers out there, fully switching to them for some time even if I didn't even like them, and after all that time I found Vivaldi the best overall browser right now (for me).

+1 for Vivaldi, so many options

tried vivaldi and it felt really bloated and clunky to me, atleast compared to zen, is that just how it is or is it much better after configuration?

Vivaldi is clunky and slow because the entire user interface (tab bar, address bar, title bar if enabled, etc) is a webview rather than native-ish controls like all other browsers.

I used it for six months and it had some things I really liked about it, but there were some really frustrating bugs that would pop up each release. I eventually got tired of it and had to move to another browser.

It's a shame, because I like the attitude and spirit behind Vivaldi.

Firefox added vertical tabs recently

Edge for me, since it has the single best implementation of vertical tabs on the market, with smooth expand on hover. Every time I try other browsers, I am immediately put off by how lacking in polish vertical tabs feel in comparison and go back.

Vivaldi has an excellent implementation of vertical tabs.

As someone who loves vertical tabs, I was disappointed with Vivaldi's vertical tab behavior/implementation compared to Edge and Brave. I used Vivaldi full time for half a year before deciding to revert back to Edge for work and Brave for personal.

Of course you can customize with CSS and other types of things, but I'd ideally like my browser to just work well and be designed well.

Having said that, I miss some features from Vivaldi. However, I am much happier using vertical tabs in other browsers that have that feature.

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