Finally vertical tabs! Great start, although definitely a lot more needs to be addressed. I will preface this by saying a lot of this feedback is comparing this to Arc browser, which imho has the best implementation of this feature by far.
As general feedback, the main points are:
1. Bookmarking needs to be updated/reworked for vertical tabs. A system like Arc, like @blu already suggested, would be ideal. Pinned tabs already works similarly to the pinned favicons in Arc, except it's tied to that specific window and disappears if the window is closed. I would suggest something like 'Sticky tabs' or 'Favourite tabs', so you can permanently keep tabs at the top of the sidebar (basically exactly how Arc works, it's fantastic).
2. Tree-style tabs - the existing extension is great and all, but having this functionality natively would be ideal. The current UI seems like it would easily work with that.
3. Favicons need to be bigger, or at least there should be an option to customize their size, right now they are too small when viewed on a high-res, large monitor.
4. Firefox already does containers and whatnot, but having different 'shelves' for sets of tabs would be amazing. Once again, basically 'Spaces' as currently used in Arc browser. Maybe work Containers into the sidebar, so you can have a list of your containers at the bottom that you can 'swipe' between.
5. Allow us to change the display of these from a row-by-row links + icon, to just one row of icons with no text and a hover tooltip (again, like Arc). Right now this is a lot of space wasted on text most people will recognise the icons for:
Encountered one major bug so far - when restarting the browser, the pinned tabs glitch out and the new tab button also goes funky:
The new history sidebar is worse in nearly every way compared to the old one.
Issues:
- Doing Control-h and typing a query no longer works
- Only one type of sorting/grouping is available
- Opening history forces an interaction instead of showing the latest visited pages
- The input box looks like no other input box anywhere in Firefox
- Worse information density
- Hover colors seem darker than previous version
I'd like to thank Mozilla for this initiative, I've been trying for a long time to eliminate tabs from my field of vision when I'm concentrating.
However, I agree with yoasif: I have a lot of trouble with the new design of the history sidebar,
I still much prefer the classic version:
I find it far too imposing (more suited to mobile than PC), not ergonomic for me and we lose legibility; less character possible too. And what could be a bit more interesting is being able to fold or unfold “child” tabs around a “parent” tab. If I could go back to the classic version (image 2), I'd be grateful.
It is possible to move to tabs that are not visible in the tab strip using the keyboard - unlike the horizontal implementation, the "tabs" remain offscreen.
In the screencast above, I have moved from tabs visible on the strip to those that are not, and back to tabs that are visible.
Hi there, great to see this out in the wild! Long-time user of tree-style tabs (and Firefox) that's been looking forward to a native implementation. For context, I tend to have 10-50 tabs open in each window, often leaning on the windows themselves for master grouping.
I'm not a TST / vertical tabs power user, but the two main features I rely on day-to-day are:
- Tab grouping / hierarchy: clicking a link in one tab (optionally) opens it as a child tab; tabs can be dragged / grouped under parent tabs (I guess this is in the name!); groups can be re-ordered
- Unloading tabs: I think this may be enabled by extension, but having the ability to selectively unload a group of tabs is great for manual memory management
In addition to those built-in features, I've also built a very simple TST hack / extension that - IMO - provides a bit more of a holistic approach to tab organisation. Instead of using vertical OR horizontal tabs, it uses both: reserving the horizontal tab space as a "workspace" for recently active and pinned tabs and then including the full laundry list in the sidebar. It's not perfect, but combined with tab grouping and unloading I've found it to be a pretty solid / flexible approach to prioritising your current area of browsing focus. I've been using it as a daily driver for a number of years. In brief:
- Pinned tabs: appear in the horizontal tab space, per the browser default
- Active tab: the currently focused tab (if not pinned) appears wide in the horizontal tab space ... page titles are easily read at a glance without opening the vertical tab sidebar. The active tab remains in the horizontal space indefinitely.
- Recently active tabs: tabs that have recently been in focus appear narrow in the horizontal tab space. After a set time they disappear (mine is set to 3 minutes). This allows you to flick between recent tabs without losing track.
- Pinned active tab: stays pinned, except the most recently active non-pinned tab stays visible in the horizontal tab space for an extended period (mine is set to 1hr)
- All tabs, except pinned: appear in the vertical tab space. This is where you organise, search, unload, etc.
To be clear, this is just one angle at solving a general tab organisation challenge. I'd be equally interested in an alternative approach that tackles the same. See below for an old screen grab:
Some additional features I'd love to see:
- Tab search: appreciate this is already available via the URL bar, but having a search / filter for the current window in the vertical tabs sidebar would be next level
- Bookmarks toolbar to right / left of sidebar: when the bookmarks horizontal toolbar is set to show only on new tabs it causes the tabs sidebar to drop down every time you open a new tab. UI shift is generally bad. Be great to see sidebar stay aligned to top and the bookmarks toolbar only take up the available width where this is the case.
- Sidebar expand on hover: this is included in my hack, but it's barebones and one of the more annoying aspects (I often accidentally open the sidebar, which can be sluggish). Would be great to see a performant native version that uses more smarts to work out when to open.
Thanks again for all the hard work. Cheers!
The sidebar's AI chatbot isn't working for me. 😥
When vertical tabs are in use, the titlebar is largely empty, containing only three redundant tab navigation buttons.
It would be preferable if the titlebar could be hidden entirely in this mode, saving some vertical space.
I mainly have three issues with the new sidebar (testing on 129 instead of nightly, sorry, lmk if any of this has been adressedalready)
- After switching to the sidebar, the + button that used to be below the tabs was there. After removing it from the top bar (and then removing the bar itself via userChrome.css), the + is gone in the sidebar. It doesn't come back if I add the + back.
- It is currently not possible to open new tabs with a double click / middle click on an empty part of the sidebar.
- It would be nice to be able to reorder the items in the lower part of the sidebar, e.g. putting bitwarden on top of the other elements.
Hi, it'd be nice if the Vertical tabs are kept seperate from the sidebar, similar to how its done in MSEdge.
Heres a similar implementation in firefox with sideberry and the bookmarks bar moved to the right to create a makeshift sidebar using custom CSS.
Heres how something similar looks im MSEdge
Cheers
