- There is a pretty popular Firefox extension called Tree Style Tabs, by "Piro". It is awesome, it is actively maintained, it works great. It has around 100k active users.
- Some time later, "philiKON" (Philipp von Weitershausen) made a smaller extension that just shows tabs vertically. "It is heavily inspired by and borrows ideas from the excellent Tree Style Tab add-on", its page says. I used it for a while, but it fell into disrepair and I switched back to TST. Vertical Tabs has around 5k users.
- Finally, "Vlad" made a fork of Vertical Tabs to fix it up a little, since philiKON had abandoned it.
So who does Mr. Henein credit? Mainly himself and his colleague Vlad. Vlad is credited as the author of Vertical Tabs at the beginning of the post, although what he was not "something [Henein]’d be willing to trial" (ouch). It needed Henein's touch to "bring this add-on to a level where users would find it delightful and usable enough to at least give it a fair shot."
But still, he does credit his pal Vlad for doing most of the work, and even throws in a mention of von Weitershausen in the middle of the post, without explaining what he has to do with Vertical Tabs.
No mention at all of Piro or Tree Style Tabs, even though it was the inspiration of Vertical Tabs, and to this day is used by orders of magnitude more people. In fact, its existence seems to be intentionally removed. "The hypothesis I was hoping to validate was that there was a subset of the Firefox user base that would find value in the layout that Side Tabs enabled. I wanted to bring this add-on to a level where users would find it delightful and usable enough to at least give it a fair shot." I would say that TST, its over 2 million downloads over at least 7 years, and its 100k active users validate that hypothesis pretty well.
I think this is a pretty shoddy way for Mozilla to treat a member of its community. There is an add-on that introduced all of these ideas to Firefox, is well-known and appreciated by Firefox power-users, and has been tirelessly maintained for seven years, yet they go and act as if "side tabs" (he even slipped his own new name for it in there) were some amazing new area of cutting-edge experimentation, while giving a hat tip to a derivative of a derivative of the original extension.
And then all the flowery rhetoric: "This is how great things are built; rarely from scratch, but more commonly on the shoulders and brilliance of those who came before you." "I’ve had great response on Twitter from developers and users who love the add-on and who can’t wait to share their ideas and thoughts. It’s awesome to see ideas take shape and grow so organically like this. This is collaboration."
Maybe I'm crazy, but the whole thing just rubs me the wrong way.