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Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out in Nightly Firefox Labs 131

asafko
Employee
Employee

Hi folks,

Vertical tabs and a new sidebar experience that make multitasking and context-switching easier are now available in Nightly 131. To try them, update to the latest Nightly and go to Settings > Firefox Labs, and activate the Sidebar and Vertical tabs experiments.

After you do this, you will be able to see the new sidebar, but you will still need to add the sidebar icon to the toolbar to be able to expand vertical tabs. Click Customize toolbar in the toolbar right-click menu, and drag the sidebar icon to your toolbar. This is a temporary situation, and in the future the icon will be added to the toolbar automatically. 

A few things to keep in mind:

  • This work is still very much in progress and has some rough edges, functionally and visually. You’ll see us improve and polish things over the coming months.
  • We will be sharing our informal backlog of improvements in this post today, so you can get a sense for where we ultimately want these features to be.
  • To design this first version, we conducted extensive research, talked to many Firefox users to understand their multitasking and context-switching needs, and prototyped extensively to find the best solutions to address them.

What we’re putting out there is something that we believe will help the majority of people using Firefox achieve their day-to-day tasks. We know there is no perfect solution for everyone and welcome your feedback to shape the direction we move forward in.

430 REPLIES 430

Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

Good feedback...and agreed! You can update your preferences by going to your Account settings > Preferences > Threaded Layout > then selecting Newest first. Hope this helps!

Also, there is a recent thread for the sidebar and vertical tabs feature - primarily for users who are seeing the experiment in Firefox 133 and 134:

Sidebar and vertical tabs: release channel experimentation  

Wow, I'm really not sure how I missed that setting earlier. Gonna fall back on "welp, username checks out."

Actually, well, I get it now. The sorting option is only available when logged in. If you're not logged in, you don't get to sort. Kind of a weird choice, to be honest.

NR2BJ
Making moves

is there a way to change sidebar scroll speed? I have a lot of tabs, but its too slow to scroll up and down. I don't want to change the whole scroll speed in firefox, just the sidebar

probablywrong
Making moves

Just want to say I love the new implementation of one-click closing vertical tabs. Perfect. No accidental closes, extremely easy to understand, works flawlessly. Nice work, folks.

wirdoworld
Making moves

I really liking the vertical tabs, especially since the close tab icon is now there, the only issue I'm currently running into is that in full screen mode the vertical tabs don't hide automatically like the horizontal tabs do.

Edit: I realize now that it is the sidebar that does not hide when in fullscreen mode, not just the vertical tabs. I would still like the sidebar to hide in fullscreen mode just like the menu bar.

CapedCrusader
Making moves

Dear Firefox Development Team,

I’d like to share some suggestions that I believe could significantly improve the user experience in Firefox. I often switch between using Arc and Firefox, but there are a few changes I’d love to see in Firefox that would make it my primary browser. Here are my key recommendations:

  1. Unify Sidebar Buttons: Combine the “Expand Sidebar,” “Customize Sidebar,” and “List All Tabs” buttons into a single, unified button, similar to the “Tab Actions Menu” in Microsoft Edge. This would streamline the interface, reduce visual clutter, and simplify navigation.
  2. Centralized Sidebar Settings: Move sidebar customization options into the main Preferences menu. Centralizing these settings would make them easier to access and manage.
  3. Simplify Scrollbars for Tabs: Currently, there are separate scrollbars for pinned tabs and other tabs. This makes it challenging to view all pinned tabs at once. A single scrollbar for both pinned and regular tabs, like in Microsoft Edge, would greatly improve usability and ensure all tabs are easily visible and accessible.
  4. Keyboard Shortcut for Expanding/Collapsing Tabs: Add a keyboard shortcut for expanding or collapsing the tabs sidebar, similar to the Arc browser’s functionality. This would allow users to quickly manage their tab view without relying solely on mouse interactions. This feature is particularly important to me and would significantly improve my workflow.
  5. Automatic Expand/Collapse on Mouse Hover: Enable the tabs sidebar to automatically expand when the user hovers near it and collapse when the mouse moves away. This behavior, similar to Microsoft Edge, would make navigation more dynamic and reduce the need for manual clicks.
  6. Tab Grouping/Workspaces: Introduce a feature for organizing tabs into groups or workspaces. This would help users manage multiple tasks or contexts, such as work, personal projects, and research, in a more structured and efficient way.
  7. Improved Memory Management for Tabs: Enhance memory management by allowing users to hibernate inactive tabs, either manually or automatically. This feature, like Edge’s “Sleeping Tabs,” would free up system resources and improve overall performance.

I’d particularly like to highlight the importance of simplifying scrollbars for tabs and adding a keyboard shortcut for expanding/collapsing tabs. These features are essential for me to transition fully from Arc to Firefox as my primary browser. Please prioritize these enhancements to make Firefox even more efficient and user-friendly.

Thank you for considering these suggestions. I look forward to seeing how Firefox continues to evolve!

I don't think it's necessary, the two buttons each have their advantages and disadvantages but for me List all tabs allows me to display the tabs occasionally whereas the side panel will be for something over time.

ggppjj
Making moves

It is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay too easy to accidentally close tabs when the sidebar is minimized. Please add auto-expand quickly.

Yes as


@ggppjj wrote:

 Please add auto-expand quickly.




vroby65
Making moves

the button to close the compressed tabs is great. only that it must be to the right and not to the left at least in case the bar is on the left

_kud
Making moves

Hi. Thank you so much for this feature; it's really great. However, you guys added a cross on the tabs, and it's really painful for me.

1. I think they should be shown only on hover.
2. Since they are here, I misclick a lot, especially on a Google Meet tab because there is also the icon for sound. So, between the cross and the sound icon, it's hard to click on the tab now. I mostly use my keyboard to close a tab, and I would like to hide those crosses to be fair.

rEgao
Making moves

The vertical tab feature is excellent! I have a few minor suggestions for improvement:

  1. Please consider making all four tab corners rounded, rather than just the top-left corner. This would provide a more cohesive and modern look.

    rEgao_1-1737944450382.png

  • It would be great if the vertical tab could automatically expand when hovered over and collapse when the mouse leaves (similar to the behavior in Microsoft Edge).
  • Regarding the AI chatbot, it always unloads when I close it to give space to the web display. I suggest adding an option in Firefox Labs to allow users to choose whether the chatbot runs in the background or is unloaded when closed.

mwm
Making moves

Looks elegant and feels silk and smooth. Thank you 🙏

Can we please have the following:

  • the ability to customize the sidebar toggle key (ctrl +z) is not the most ergonomic shortcut.
  • the option to toggle sidebar [attached gif] and address bar on hover?

 

 

 

 

Pfize183
Making moves

Thank you so much for close button on hover with the latest update. Looking forward for open sidebar on hover.

 

 

noahc3
Making moves

Hey guys, thanks for adding vertical tabs to the sidebar. This plus the tab groups in the most recent nightly (at least I think it wasn't there earlier...) have made me switch from random browser forks like Zen and Floorp back to Firefox.

The sidebar has one critical feature missing: we should be able to have the sidebar automatically collapse to icons (or some people might prefer collapse to nothing), then automatically expand to full tab width on hover, expanding over the webpage (don't shrink the page viewport). This feature is in Floorp, Zen and a lot of Chrome fork sidebar implementations and is the one thing holding me back from recommending switching to Firefox.

RealTango
Making moves

I also add my vote for the ability to expand the sidebar on hover.  I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard it would be to add that feature, but as others have mentioned, there are a couple of Firefox forks that have achieved that.  Thanks to the Mozilla team for such great browser !!!!

sclem
Employee
Employee

Its great to see all the interest in the sidebar and vertical tabs! We are working on expand on hover - its not quite ready but will be available soon. 🙂

I do see a setting in about:config on the Nightly version, "sidebar.expandOnHover."  I set this to "True" but it doesn't appear to do anything?  Is this by design or am I missing something?

After you set this to true you have to activate Expand sidebar on hover in the sidebar at the gear icon.

Duh to me!!  Thanks for the response!!  Much appreciated!!

VEG
Making moves

The new sidebar design is questionable. The added rounder border with a shadow wastes some space and looks ugly. The vertical toolbar should be removable, I'm perfectly capable to switch between sidebar modes using sidebar title.

Or use an ancient idea from the good old All-in-One Sidebar extension and put sidebar's toolbar right into sidebar header:

VEG_0-1739204459421.png

It also has a convenient 2-pixel vertical panel where you could click to collapse or uncollapse the sidebar. Just look on this video how it was working:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ola2LNNDVVU

The video is from good old times when Firefox had really great and flexible extensions.

Pfize183
Making moves

In the sidebar is since the latest nightly update to much wasted space on the right size. I'm not able to resize it smaller.

sidebar.png

 

Thanks, I was going to say it ^^

I'm quite admiring the improvements made recently to this new feature, I'm really looking forward to being able to click on the little cross when the vertical tabs are folded (I mean on the classic version, not on Nightly 😉) ^^ but for a few days now I've also had this spacing on my vertical tabs ....

Why didn't you leave the basic responsive that you had? Maybe it's a bug and the resolution is already planned ...

See the differente :

Hello

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1948444#c1


Can be temporarily workarounded by setting browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0

If you wish to test
Configuration Editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
Enter a search term browser.tabs.tabMinWidth

Agentvirtuel
Collaborator

Thank you 😊

newguy123
Making moves

This feature very badly needs nesting.

As a user, I go on random research sprees frequently - when I do this, I use "open new tab" absolutely everywhere - and I commonly unwind these "stacks" when it comes time to clean up these tabs.

In other words, "open new tab" is my way of forming a new branch of my web surfing activity. And if I want to clean up a particular branch _and all of its descendants_, that should feel easy. Right now, it feels just as hard as usual.

Enter: tab nesting. tab nesting is required, because opening a new tab from a website implies a parent -> child relationship. Ctrl+T, on the other hand, makes a brand new branch.

 

This is uniquely allowed because a sidebar allows for a horizontal hierarchy, where a topbar does not. It makes the web browser feel extremely powerful.

 

Here's an example browsing session:

<google search for ww1>

    <wikipedia: world war 1>

        <wikipedia: trenches>

            <trench company website>

        <wikipedia: US metal industry>

<youtube search results>

    <music vid>

 

I'm reading about the metal industry, and realize I'm very distracted. I want to close all of the tabs and do something else. Right click on "google search for ww1" -> close tabs

 

Make firefox tabs powerusery as hell, it'll be dope & bring the masses over.

PetrInfinite
Making moves

I just want to thank everyone involved in developing vertical tabs. Cannot live without them anymore.

Thank you for taking a moment out of your day to leave a positive comment - it's very much appreciated by the team!

Jinn
Making moves

Ignore.