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Comment by eviks | Hacker News Reader

Right after they reach at least ~80% of customization Vivaldi offers!

This isn't the gotcha you think it is. Every time I try Vivaldi I am right back at Firefox and I am surely not alone. I have never understood the obsession with tree style tabs or vertical tabs. I don't need to customise my browser at all and I like supporting engine diversity.

went from Firefox to Vivaldi, never looked back for many years

on Android phone tried many, most recently was using Kiwi Browser, then for some time Firefox until they fucked up UI, so moved to Cromite, though my phone broke (never buy Google Pixel again, first broken phone after 15 years with smartphones and various brands including very low budget), so now I am on my old phone which for some reason doesn't support Cromite, so I am back at Firefox temporarily

Why not Vivaldi on android as well, and benefit from sync etc? That's what I've been doing for about 8 months now. Generally quite happy.

no extensions, cant live without uBlock Origin and few others

I use cromite also.Your old phone may work with version 138.0.7204.184 I believe uptown app store offers that version.

thanks for the tip, I assumed some older version would work but anyway using it only temporarily until I switch to something more modern and can deal with that UI for few days/weeks at worst, anyway Cromite has its cons as well, it regularly exit UbO which need to be relaunched (plus also the UbO menu is cropped and not fully displayed), that's sort of deal breaker compared to UI, I am experiecing it quite frequently, I wish there would be Kiwi Browser successor which would have stable UbO support, Helium doesn't even support MV2 and Ultimatum also didn't work very good to me, so might as well return to FF even on new phone despite the horrible UI

The motivation for vertical tabs is pretty straightforward, screens are mostly wider than they are tall, browsers are often used in fullscreen mode, yet much of the web does not use much of the screen's width. So it's a better use of screen space to put tabs on the side than on top.

tabs also contain horizontal text

True. And when I first saw that Tor browser (i.e. Firefox) offered a vertical tabs mode without the tab title (and only the favicons), I thought it was the stupidest vertical tab UI design possible. But then I decided to try it for a week, and guess what - I appreciated the extra space, and it wasn't as hard identifying the tabs through their favicons as I thought it would be. And if needed you can always drag the vertical tab sidebar to reveal the tab title. (Note though that I am not one of these people who opens 100's of tabs and keeps it open. In fact, I find too many tabs cluttering and distracting and if I need to scroll to find my tabs I start closing the tabs).

Of course, Firefox does support vertical tabs nowadays :) (Not tree-style though.)

What are you on about? :) Give Sidebery a try. The king of all tree-style tab browsers and the #1 reason I won't move away from Firefox.

Heh true, I did actually use Sidebery before switching to the built-in vertical tabs, which is what I was referring to - but yes, extensions can add tree-style tabs.

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