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Mozilla released a Firefox Nightly test build with vertical tabs - gHacks Tech News
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2024
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Bad news is that it is not clear at this point whether Mozilla is going to go forward with the implementation. A post on Reddit by one of the project members suggests that the build is a "rough proof-of-concept". Some features tested in the build "did not survive". It is unclear which did not, as they are not mentioned. Mozilla is, however, implementing those that survived the cut into Firefox. Again, the poster does not mention which those are. It is also not verified that the poster is actually a member of the project team, so take this with a grain of salt as well.
Isn't Firefox open source? So isn't it possible that anyone could see the changes being made even in the nightly versions? I'm not a programmer so forgive my ignorance.
I use Edge on my work computer since I can log into it with enterprise SSO and store my passwords and bookmarks to my work account. Not ideal, but I don't do anything personal on my work computer because I already have zero expectation of privacy on it anyway.
Vertical Tabs are an absolute game-changer, especially combined with tab groups. I can actually juggle hundreds of tabs in a single browser window without issue. It's the only thing I can say that Edge got right.
I've been waiting for this development for a long time. I can't wait to have this functionality on my personal computer, on a privacy-respecting FOSS browser no less. The extensions currently available for this are just not that great, it has to be a native feature.
Ff with sidebery is pretty amazing. Although, it's annoying you need to add a CSS file to disable regular tabs.
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i wish they'd include vertical tabs and oneline navbar in settings rather than making the users edit userchrome. userchrome is really fun but it'd be much more accessible if it was on settings.
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Alright, now do bifurcating diagonal tabs.
Sinusoidal wave tabs are clearly the only way to tab.
Never saw the appeal in vertical tabs, but maybe Edge or FF extensions just don't do them well enough... Good for Mozilla though, I guess
For 16:9 (ish) displays you have more pixels left to right than up and down, it makes sense to use up your horizontal space first when placing permanent UI elements on your screen. Still up to preference though.
Agree... Too much screen real estate horizontally, not enough vertically
Especially with the gigantic tab buttons the browser uses by default even in "compact" mode.
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Those screenshots look really nice, ngl, hoping this goes through. Edge and Vivaldi have had their own vertical tab implementations for a while now, and there are Firefox forks that show it can be done. No reason for base Firefox not to have it at this point.
While I'm here, Mozilla bring back compact spacing, plz k thx.
Edit: Just tried it, it's got that nightly jank but it's promising. I hope Mozilla continues with this. It looks and feels great.
My goodness yes, having to enable it in developer settings every time so annoying.
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Literally the only thing I wanted!! 💚
congratulats to the people liking them i guess. i personally dont get it, since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though
The counterpoint is since 16:9 became the de facto standard for monitors, vertical resolution is at much more of a premium than horizontal resolution is.
Not to mention that most sites will put their main content into a container with a limited width anyway, since overly long lines are awful to read. So unless you're using the browser side-by-side with other content on a low-res monitor it's a net benefit. And even if it's not I usually find the extra vertical space to be worth more, as you said.
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since most languages are written horizontally and i like ux to reflect this structure. such things are subjective though
You might be misunderstanding what we mean by vertical tabs - we aren't literally turning the tabs sideways and putting them on the side of the browser. We're placing the tabs, still horizontal, into a stacked, scrollable list on the side of the browser. The superiority of this display method for tabs on widescreen displays is not subjective, and here's why:
- Tab titles are not typically very long, but there tend to be a lot of them. This data is far more readable and accessible as a bulleted list than a long paragraph.
- Beyond about ten to fifteen tabs, tabs displayed at the top, side by side, must either shrink and obscure the title, go off-screen and be invisible without scrolling, or stack in multiple rows across the top. A vertical tab setup can easily display 30-40 of them in a vertical list, all with the maximum visible amount of their titles which helps distinguish them from one another.
- Modern desktop screens are wider than they are high, but webpage content scrolls vertically, often leaving a lot of empty space on the sides.
- Eyestrain is reduced and readability improves when the width of the reading area is reduced. This is why text on the web almost never fills the full width of a widescreen display, why most books are taller than they are wide, and why newsprint articles have many narrow columns rather than filling the entire page.
- Given points 3 and 4, tabs at the top of the browser window on a widescreen display leave slightly less room for the actual page contents, while tabs displayed in a vertical list on one side only cut into the white space that exists on the sides of the content, while keeping the titles readable and causing less eyestrain.
- With one change, a list can become an outline with sections and headers, following your own train of thought as you branch out and expand on each idea. In the same way, tabs displayed as a list can be very easily displayed with a tree structure, allowing tabs to be grouped, collapsed, and generally organized in ways that are impossible for traditional-style top-tabs.
This is why Tree Style Tabs exists, though I prefer Sidebery these days, being more customizable and performant than TST. There's no way I can ever go back to top-tabs.
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Try out Tree Style Tabs for an hour. I'm curious how you'll feel about it.
I've been using TST for years and while it can be a bit buggy at times I couldn't imagine going back to the default tab system.
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I think you're missing what's going on. The text is still written left-to-right. You don't need to read the tabs vertically. The tabs are stacked on top of each other in the sidebar instead of lined up along the top of the window.
I believe their point is that their language is left to right, so it just makes sense to them to have the tabs structure left to right as well.
I happen to share this sentiment, but can understand why some people may like it different.
I completely hid my tabs with custom css and I'll never go back. With something like vimium-c you can switch tabs with vim-like bindings and an fzf-like menu. If you have lots of tabs, the fzf way is way faster to pick out a specific tab than it is to look for it in a tab row (or column). If you have few tabs, you don't even need to see them to know where they are. I'm being very serious. Tabs are bloat. I recommend trying it out if it is something for you.
(edit) On top of that, it looks so clean. You get a bit more space for the actual content (I also hide my url bar, it pops up when you use it). It fits right in with a keyboard focus workflow, you get consistent keybindings across vim and your browser (I use the same keybinds for switching buffers in vim so it feels the same).
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My dream would for this to at least have an option for collapsable tree-style tabs. That's what I'm missing the most from the Edge implementation. Even "normal" vertical tabs struggle when you have over a hundred open tabs.
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anyone else feel like a lot of these firefox updates recently are just them implementing the most popular extensions from firefox 3.6?
It's always been like this. Aside from Gecko and/or security updates that's how all browser development has functioned since add-ons became a thing.
I migrated from Edge for the last time to avoid Manifest v4, I’ve been missing vertical tabs a lot. Sidebery just didn’t work for me. I really like how this is looking.
I would love the option of keeping containers in vertical tabs with "page tabs" horizontal. For example; Facebook, Personal, Banking, Work, Incognito, etc containers along the left as vertical tabs, and each one has all the pages in tabs across the top. Vertical tabs only appear after you open more than one type of container.
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I tried so hard to get used to vertical tabs, and failed miserably. I just can't like them. Lol
And to round out this story, here’s a photo that we think evokes the concept of “vertical”.
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I was just today trying FF again and discovered vertical tabs was via extension only and holy shit disabling the tabs up top looked like a bit of work. Native vertical tabs and grouping and I'm back. It should just copy the layout that Edge does.
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Yesss come on! I moved to Edge at my place of work because I can no longer see what I'm doing with horizontal tabs. And we can't use addons in Firefox.
This will land in ESR in three years time and then we'll be rolling...
Shit just got real
I just spent 3 days learning a basic level of css and messing around in my userchrome and NOW they decide to add it...
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Waterfox beating it to the punch lol
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