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Comment by scottjad | Hacker News Reader

Where I really want side tabs is on my Android Nexus 7 tablet.

On it in Chrome I normally browse the web in portrait mode and I can see the titles of about three tabs, but only a few words of each. With a slide out side panel on the left (activated by dragging left to right from off the screen onto the screen) I would be able to see the titles for 15 or so tabs, with larger press areas and close buttons.

I realize for every tab switch this would require a swipe and a click, but as it is now the tab is often not one of the three visible and so I already have to swipe multiple times across the tab bar to see the tab before clicking it.

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Chrome had side tabs for a long time. It was a 'hidden feature' you had to enable in the about:config screen. But Google knows how you're supposed to surf, and vertical side tabs are not it. So they tore it out. Many issues were opened on their bug tracker asking for it to be replaced, but the final word came down - 'we don't like vertical tabs, and therefore no one can have them. Stop opening new issues.'

Sheez. Why not enable users to drag any tab to anywhere along any edge of any window?

Tabbed window manager with pie menus for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0, from 1991: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/movies/TabWindowDemo.mov

NeWS PostScript source code: http://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/tab-3.0.2.ps.txt

Also, you should be able to push and throw windows around on the screen, and they should bounce off the the screen edges! ;)

Here it is in Lisp for Genera: http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/103

And in Forth for X10: http://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/piemenu/uwm1/hacks.f

Firefox on my N7 has side tabs, but with full-tab previews, not just the titles. I don't find the extra space used to be a problem.

Unfortunately not in portrait mode, at least for me. And in both portrait and landscape modes on my N7 Firefox only shows 3.5 tabs, about the same as Chrome.

You just described Firefox's tab switcher on Android.

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