Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out

I think the best vertical tabs implementation in firefox is Sidebery. The use of "panes" to group tabs is brilliant. Older versions were buggy, but version 5 has been rock solid for me.

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more

I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.

I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".

Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly.

But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.

FF has said that they are finally adding groups, too, but I haven't heard anything about the timing of that. I'm really looking forward to that as I currently use a plugin for that and would love to drop the third-party plugin for something native. I'm always worried about the risk of a third-party plugin like that with such broad access.

I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.

Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either

Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year?

On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone.

Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.

The unfortunate thing is that Firefox could be the perfect platform for browser UI experimentation if more care were put into making the project easier to fork and reasonable to keep up to date with mainline.

A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.

... it does have groups and profiles. You probably know this, but Firefox has its own version of profiles, although its a bit hidden.

You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window.

I do agree that this needs a better UI

The current implementation still leaves in the tab bar at the top at least on Macs. I hope they iron these bugs out before their stable release.

Great now they just need to add back a dedicated grab-zone along the top of the window

Waterfox has vertical tabs

http://archive.is/uzj4z

In case it helps any reader, I recently discovered the [cmd + shift + a] / [control + shift + a] shortcut in chrome for ‘vertical tabs-ish’ in searchable form

Vivaldi is very far ahead, and it has vertical tabs, not sure how Chrome is the only comparator for a niche browser

FYI you also need a bit of custom CSS to get rid of the title bar if you want to replicate this screenshot. By default if you turn on vertical tabs you still have an empty title bar across the top.

Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated

How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated.

This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed.

In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.

They have tab containers though.

I actively use tree style tabs, and have dozens to hundreds. With auto tab discard, it's not taxing.

This is because I basically use tabs as bookmarks relevant to a project or subject area. Bookmarks are also tree-structured, but are much more high-ceremony to create.

To my mind, tabs and bookmarks should meld into one. If you don't close a tab actively, it stays deactivated, its tree likely gets collapsed until needed, so it's not an eyesore. When you need it again, it's there, in the proper context.

If you close a tab, it goes to history. But a tree view of history is possible, too (there are extensions for that), so that you can track, from which page did you open this link, what links did you open on this page, etc.

You must not had ADD :-). I currently have 2630 tabs in my main window (I admit I may need to prune that down _just a bit_). But that many tabs can only happen with a vertical tab-bar. I started with tree-style tabs but I'm now using "Sideberry" which seems to be a little nicer.

Have you tried Simple Tab Groups? It's a similar concept but instead of keeping all the tabs organised as a tree (and generally keeping them all open), you can create groups of tabs that are kept unloaded/hidden and you can load them up on a given window with a click of a button or a hotkey.

I personally use them so I can context switch between projects. I can keep one group for project a, one for project b, one for project c, and so on while also keeping a group for day to day stuff, one for reading material, one for conference talks/background noise, etc.

Then I can just unload a given group when I don't need it without losing anything and I can bring it back up on that window (or a different window) later when I need it again.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

I feel like tree style tabs made sense when monitors were just a little narrower and so you wanted to make use of unused real estate.

These days I want to split my window in half and have two windows open at once, e.g. code editor & browser/shell/etc.

In general, I prefer having a search interface to my tabs, previously with Tabli, but now it's built into Chrome with Ctrl-Shift-A. I regularly have dozens of tabs open though.

Yeah, I gave an honest shot at using vertical tabs for a few months because it frankly does seem like a more logical use of screen real estate. Web pages don't tend to take up much horizontal space, so you might as well put a bigger list of tabs there where they can all show more text.

For one thing I could just never get used to my normal tab-switching shortcuts moving me up and down compared to left and right. And all my other apps with tabs still use horizontal tabs, so I couldn't fully switch over to that model in my head. Additionally the URL is still at the top so it was more work to glance back and forth between the left of my browser for the tab and the URL at the top which in my mind are more "closely linked" for that to make sense.

But you also highlighted a good point, the limited space of traditional tabs does keep my organization in check. Once I get around the 20-tab mark and I'm unable to see any text beyond the website's favicon, I start feeling dirty and it gives me some incentive to clean up.

I love using Sidebery, because I can define a container profile for each group of tabs, which is then applied automatically for new tabs.

This is a failure of the browser setup if you have to resort to a text file for tabs

Also don't get the benefit of the stateless session as a private window - you can just as well close a regular second browser window and not look back at history?

Nobody will probably read this anymore but I had the same problem and used the same solution - starting my browsers as $ google-chrome --profile-directory=customera (nice dark theme, custom list of extensions and corporate bookmarks) $ google-chrome --profile-directory=customerb (yeallow-blue theme to stand out)

and a session for my own stuff / firefox with --profile with custom proxy settings to tunnel via a socks around customers corp mitm proxy

That being said, I spent my free computer time working on a server runtime(nodejs) + extension kombo (big thanks to talented folks helping with this project!) which can sync your tabs based on the context you are in - lets say /work/customer-foo/dev/task1234 would index all your tabs for task 1234, but that path is actually linked to bitmap indexes, /work/customer-foo would show you all links for customer foo, if you'd create /work/dev it would show you all tabs that are indexes for work AND dev

anyhow sorry for spam, good to see people are struggling with the same UX problems I've been :)

I put together a simple TST hack / extension that puts recently active tabs in the horizontal space (with a "user-defined" timeout). Have been using it actively for the last few years.

https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/6813b2c27611be03...

It's nowhere near perfect (see comments in the gist), but I genuinely enjoy the paradigm of easy access active tabs alongside a full laundry list. I find myself reinstalling it on new machines as I go. It's also just a few lines of CSS.

That said, keen to try out the nightly version of vertical tabs. Tho I'm hoping my active tabs hack might work with it too.

I used to be a tree-style-tabs power user but at some point I went back to regular tabs. I find that the amount of horizontal tab space is pretty close to the actual number of things I can usefully have open at once. Seeing the tabs get "squished" is my reminder to close the ones I no longer need.

I followed the same trajectory. I now keep one window for more stable things that will be left open for a while (calendar, email, some long-lived task) and another for stuff I'm actively working on (the app I'm developing, docs for some API, etc). If I go over more than two windows with ~6 tabs each I just start closing things because I've almost certainly gone past the point of needing some of those tabs and if I need to get back to them it's usually faster to just retrace the steps I took to get to them in the first place or search in my history.

It really depends on your workflows. I dread tree style on work laptop as I go through tickets a lot, and only what matters to me is last 4 digits out of 10 the tickets have. If I use horizontal tabs second half of tab name is truncated but opposite on tree styled ones

treestyle tabs cured my tabs 'saving' syndrome, I now just close the ones I don't need

it probably helped that I supplanted it with a better way to access history with vimium

I'm using less and less tabs the less useful search engines become.

Nowadays I don't get the tabs "squished" at all. But that used to happen often, and with no impact on my capacity to use them.

I use Edge currently because of the vertical tabs and I switch between the two modes to suit my needs. 90% of the time, I only use horizontal tabs. For the other 10%, it suits my needs when doing research, keeping all my tabs available and so on.

I recommend Tree Tabs over Tree Style Tabs as it let's you make tab groups. I will basically have one group per ticket or project, coloring the group depending on the state of that ticket (eventually going green when I've completed it but want to keep it around for a short while in case questions arise). Once the ticket has been done for a sprint I'll close the entire tab group.

OS window managers do a better job of that. Split view inside the browser has some thorny issues around making sure the user knows what resource they are interacting with. There is a lot of complexity when it comes to focus/blur in HTML, CSS, JS, etc.

Arc browser does this, you should check that out

On a Mac I use Rectangle Pro for something similar, snapping my windows next to each other. It's not perfect but it does allow multiple sets of tabs at once.

Try Vivaldi, it has something like that

I do this all the time by just dragging a tab off so it's a second window (and hitting a key in my wm to make them side-by-side). The only problem is that the address bar turns so tiny it's impossible to read it among all the pointless icons that should've been in the overflow menu, I wish there were a way to make it prioritise showing the url instead of icons for "bookmark this page" and "certified by digicert" etc.

Edge has this, and vertical tabs too.

I regularly use 'split-view' with Firefox with the aid of a window manager, PaperWM (which is a horizontal scrolling WM for GNOME) to be exact. Just drag the tab out of the tab bar and the newly created window is automatically tiled to a sort of 'split-view' right next to the original one.

Edge has this, though I have no idea why you wouldn't just open a second window...

Very simple in Firefox (tested in Firefox 60.4.0.esr - any later check toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets etc.):

- use userChrome.css to display ALL tabs side by side:

profile/chrome/userChrome.css :

  tabpanels {
    display: -moz-box !important;
  }

  tabpanels > notificationbox {
    -moz-box-flex: 1;
    border-width: 2px !important;
    border:solid #888;
  }

- with extension like last_selected_tab AFAIR, or your own, to have content-secondary, handled - then hide any browser of other type with styles as well (as by default you have only: tabpanels > notificationbox > browser[type=content-primary] - being the active tab). :)

Edge does that

Vivaldi does this also.

Why not just do that with your window manager??

Opera had a very mature & expressive implementation of this feature back before version 15 (when they adopted Chromium). Since then, Vivaldi (created by Opera founder) is trying to rebuild all of the OG Opera features - they have this feature now; not as powerful as it once was but they're working on it.

This is better accomplished by adding keyboard shortcuts to the browser for popping out a tab into a separate window, and then you can use the window manager’s shortcuts to arrange side-by-side, or however you want.

It’s preferable to have such building blocks of functionality, which one can then combine in many ways.

I'm a little confused why your current solution of letting your window manager handle this is insufficient? I'll often have two or more windows of a browser open to have "paned" browsing.

The Arc browser (macOS and Windows) has exactly that feature

Floorp, a Firefox fork, has this feature.

Vivaldi has that . Helpful for comparison, charts etc

Use a tiling window manager and you can put anything side by side.

I find the tab paradigm very deficient, though. I used to think tabs were great (like everyone), until I learnt Emacs. Emacs doesn't have tabs. You can just open anything in any window at any time and split windows arbitrarily, even in text mode over SSH. It's so much better. Having each tab limited to some viewport is so unnecessarily limiting.

Yeah, widescreen monitors lend themselves nicely to a split pane view and I wish more applications used it.

You can try Arc, it does that.

You can support feature requests on Mozilla Connect: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab...

Back in the XUL days there was an addon that did this. And it wasn't just two, I'm pretty sure you could split arbitrarily deep, both horizontal and vertical.

We lost a lot when they abandoned that.

Most browsers except Chrome have some sort of vertical tabs support.

- Safari (Mac) has a vertical tabs, but a very confusing UI, mixing Profiles, Windows and Tab Groups (only 1 level).

- Edge has Workspaces and Vertical Tabs, along with Groups (only 1 level).

- Chrome does not have vertical tabs and has 1 level groups

- Vivaldi has vertical tabs and groups, not sure how many levels of grouping.

- Firefox has Containers and Vertical Tabs (today), but for best results you still need something like Tab Stash, Sideberry or TST.

- Orion Browser (Mac) has the best UI imho and allows for grouping tabs at as many levels as you want, but you cannot have proper "folders", only nested tabs.

- Arc gets everything right, in my opinion, but I do not specially care much for the candy UI.

You could check out Vivaldi. The split view is pretty robust. The Vertical tabs can be on left or right, and allow one level of tab grouping.

Edge is stable and has vertical tabs and split view support.

Edge even has vertical tabs now. There are always add-ons, but I agree this should he a first class feature in all browsers.

The annoying thing about the vertical tabs in Edge is that Microsoft eliminated the vertical taskbar option in Windows 11. One step forward and two steps back.

And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.

I really, really don't understand the hype around Arc. I tried it for a while and just wasn't at all impressed. I've heard, though, that a lot of people praise how it help them deal with hundreds of tabs, and I don't keep my tabs open, so maybe I'm the wrong audience?

(This is ignoring the fact that I tried it again a month ago and it wouldn't load a single page. I emailed their help and never heard from them, so I guess that's my last try for a while.)

Brave has vertical tabs, and a helpful grouping feature. Highly recommend.

???

Edge, Brave, Vivaldi have native vertical tabs built in.

Firefox now too.

Opera Presto was first way before them all.

Why are you and another comment mention some no-name flashy browser?

I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and split view.

I wish UI toolkits just came fully loaded and let me spin views and panels and anything in any which way I liked.

I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

It's funny how we've gone full cycle. Early versions of Firefox get vertical tabs because the plugin system is very rich and you could do whatever you wanted with XUL. Firefox quantum comes around and kills XUL based extensions, vertical tabs are dead. Arc revives an ancient idea as something new and hip, firefox "responds" by reviving the very thing they killed.

Maybe (probably?), but back when I worked at Mozilla in ~2010 "Tree Style Tabs" was one of the most popular add-ons.

Here's a screenshot of what the feature looks like:

https://www.ghacks.net/2024/06/25/you-can-try-vertical-tabs-...

It seems they took a cue from Arc for the pinned tabs icons. Now they only need to add tab groups a la Tab Stash, Sideberry or Tree Style Tab, and combine that with Sync. Still a lot of work ahead, but this looks very promising.

Kudos to the Firefox team.

Edge and Vivaldi had vertical tabs as native functionality before Arc even existed.

Firefox also had it via an extension.

I would imagine a minor browser would be less of an influence than the fact that most browsers have vertical tabs as an option at this point, or even just the slew of add-ons for Firefox itself.

I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

What age are you?

How long have you been using computers?

Sorry to be this blunt, but I am asking as Firefox has had addons for vertical tabs for a long time.

Vivaldi, Edge, Brave all have vertical tabs.

Opera Presto was first.

Why even mention this Arc? I feel like you just jumped on some hype train and you have been using Google Chrome and just recently found out about vertical tabs. Good for you but it is not a new development.

Hadn't heard of Arc, went to download it just now, and...it requires an account to use? Really?

Browser UIs have barely evolved in the past decade so I guess I'm excited that Firefox is trying something new.

I use Edge for work and the vertical tabs with grouping works really nicely. On the other hand Arc's website made me throw up in my mouth a little bit. Unfortunately it does indeed seem like that's what Firefox wants to ape.

1. Screens are usually wider than most web pages usefully support. This uses up space that would normally be wasted.

2. Most screens are wider than they're high. This is especially true of laptops. So using vertical space for a horizontal strip really eats into the vertical real estate.

3. Most written scripts are horizontal. As a result, lists are usually arranged vertically. This aligns with how lists in nearly every other context are arranged (how many times have you found a list where the second item is to the right of the first, the third to the right of the second, as opposed to them being on new vertically arranged lines?)

4. Since the text in most languages flow horizontally, it's trivially easy to adjust the width of a vertical tab container to customize how much of the text you want visible. This could range from really wide tab containers so you can see the entire title (which the larger width of monitors makes almost cost free) or you can make it really narrow to only include the icon, or somewhere in between. Arranging tabs horizontally provides no such easy and obvious UI to do such a thing, so you're reduced to either seeing fixed size tabs or icons only, controlled largely by the browser.

5. Again, because of horizontal text, tabs are shorter than they are wide. You can fit a lot more tabs in a vertical tabbar while still displaying their text than you could in a horizontal one.

You'll find it's usefulness relative to the width/resolution of your screen and the amount of tabs you tend to have open at once.

I've got an ultra wide display and more horizontal than vertical space.

Also most websites scroll vertically and it feels better to have more in view at the same time. After 600px horizontally, most sites just render white space.

Horizontal tabs become a pain with more than a handful of tabs open, particularly on small screens. Vertical handles any number of tabs gracefully regardless of screen size.

Because you can fit more information and vertical scrolling is easier (you also have a bigger area to scroll in), so navigation is also more convenient

Screens typically have much more horizontal space but ideal page text width has a limit so the sides end up as unused space. Also tab nesting can be very useful for organization.

aren't workspaces the same as containers? when I right click the new tab icon in firefox it gives me an option to open them in work, personal, banking, etc or to create a new container

3 is also built in, called firefox sync. You can open any tab from any device on another one and send tab(s) to other devices

#3

There is an extension that lets you save and sync either all tabs or a certain window and restore wherever. Not exactly what you are looking for I think, but its very useful for me.

I believe that Google had something similar back in the day as an extension to Chrome but removed it.

Great when I am troubleshooting something at work and when done still want the 20+ pages saved for later reference but not open. Or when I am planning for the weekend or researching a product at work during lunch and want to open a bunch of tabs at home later.

https://github.com/sienori/Tab-Session-Manager

1. Sideberry.

2. Sideberry.

3. Firefox Sync.

Firefox has had these features since at least 5 years ago (#3) and probably 15 years ago (#1, #2 through Tree Style Tabs).

There's a setting "Open links in tabs instead of new windows" which should help your use case

https://arc.net/ is pretty popular, but alright.

I'm glad they released it, I like vertical tabs.

Currently, there's now way to enable a wider sidebar that shows tab titles, too.

I think this is a bug, I had the same issue but then went to "Customize Sidebar" and toggled "Sidebar settings" to "Always show" and now I see titles, regardless of which sidebar show setting I have

The button next to the refresh button is what makes the side bar show wider tabs (Icon, title, close button). It took me way too long to figure that out.

Another user pointed to this screenshot on reddit.

https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1emmfvb/ive_just_f...

Why don't you use bookmarks?

Counterpoint - I wanted a native implementation of vertical tabs. Sidebery's fine, but it feels like an extension rather than something properly built in.

I still miss Opera Presto. It was so ahead of everyone and after 10 years no other browser can compete with it (UI-wise).

I had the same issue but it turns out you can expand them to show the titles by clicking the "side bar" button that, for me, was left of my address bar. Odd default but this is in a nightly release and others have already provided feedback to them on this.

Tab Groups is another feature that FF recently prioritized in their roadmap. I would expect it to be integrated with this feature.

https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab...

It does not seem to be currently possible. I guess they are working on it, this is just a first step.

Firefox equivalents:

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/auto-close-tabs/

https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/limit-active-tabs/

I don't understand this. Sideberry is literally 1:1 feature parity and had existed for 5 years. Whereas this is not the 'tab grouping' that they promised and have been talking about for 3 years. This is a massive disappointment.

Might have to try this. I've been waiting for browser vendors to realize that users don't get joy from browsers themselves, they want the web-apps that browsers provide access to. If I notice my browser it's probably because the browser messed up.

Mobile browsers in particular seem to think it's critical that they take up at least 15% of screen space at all times.

Such a glaring oversight that I'm actually wondering if it was intentional. Causes engagement/sharing/spreading of other associated commentary/links on the release?

The meta bug was created 3 months ago: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1894060

I know that FF says that Tab Groups are on their roadmap but I hope that get to it soon. I'm tired of relying on third-party plugins for that function.

It's probably not helpful to you since it's a different browser, but Safari has this. Right click on any tab in its vertical tabs list and choose Arrange Tabs By -> Website.

They've already added a toggle to disable horizontal tabs.