For me, tab location is spacial in my mind, and so many years of having them horizontal makes it hard to switch. Somewhere between 25 and 40 I start having trouble finding things at which point I just close them all and start over. I do use the tab drop-down in Firefox, but mostly to more quickly find things I want to close. Also completion in the url bar to find specific open tabs is quite useful.
If you use Firefox's URL bar for this, typing % before your search limits the results strictly to open tabs.
I switched back to horizontal tabs because sidebars eat up too much horizontal screen space.
This is a valid reason to switch back, but I'd also like to call out that UX designers need to do more for users with limited horizontal space. Many users rely on split-screen mode to see two windows simultaneously, or maybe three windows simultaneously if they've got a widescreen 21:9 aspect ratio monitor.
>Vertical tabs are not a standard. Chrome does not have them natively. Safari does not have them at all.
Google Chrome added vertical tab support in 2026 Q2 and Safari has had them even longer.
The sweet spot for me is vertical tabs that autohide into a narrow strip of icons until hovered over (like Edge or certain firefox CSS tweaks)
I have the opposite problem: I close tabs too soon, but history solves that.
Thank goodness to ctrl+shift+T
I often use that, but sometimes the tab I'm looking for is 5-10 closed tabs back...