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

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 was using the tab-state as a sort of short-term working memory and I don't think it was doing me any favours, particularly in terms of focus.

Now when I'm working on a project, I keep a list of relevant URLs in a text file (i.e. bookmarks but checked into source control).

I also use two browser windows, a regular one for "stateful" browsing, and a private-mode one for "stateless" browsing. Quick queries and exploratory research happens in the "stateless" session, with the understanding that I can close any of these tabs (or nuke the whole session) at any time without losing anything important. If I do come across something important, it gets noted down elsewhere.

Found a recent screenshot of it on Reddit. Looks good, I hope it has similar nesting like Tree Style Tab though. In my opinion that is still the best implementation of this idea across all browsers.

Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either – but it does have groups and profiles. They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more, so I'm glad they finally found some time to do this.

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

This made me think of one thing that I've wanted to see for a long time with browsers: split-pane view.

In other words, the ability to see two browser sessions, side-by-side, with a vertical split between them. Two viewports, each with their group of tabs. The same type of view you can get in, for example, Notepad++ with its "Tab>Move to Other View", or Visual Studio's "Tab>New Vertical Document Group".

I frequently arrive at situations where I want to compare the contents of one webpage against the contents of another webpage. So far, the most usable option I've found is to split the 2nd tab off into a new window, then arrange the two windows side-by-side.

There is "Side View"[1], but that shows a bare viewport, which makes browsing in the 2nd viewport much more restricted than regular browsing.

[1] https://blog.mozilla.org/en/products/firefox/its-a-new-firef...

A screenshot of how it looks would have been helpful. I guess this is in response to Arc browsers design. https://arc.net/

I wish all browsers has first class vertical tabs support and split view. I am really tired of resource hog, unstable arc. Want to return back to traditional browsers but they are not supporting vertical tabs like arc did. And arc turn its face to AI instead of stability (I guess) because of investors.

So we are lonely in the dark :)

Screenshot:

https://imgur.com/hoOlRDy

Happy that this will finally be a feature of FF. Still pretty useless for me, though, for these reasons:

- There's an empty tab bar shown at the top of the window.

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

Why does an announcement like this not have a screenshot of the feature?

Cool. But dammit why aren't tabs more modifiable. I want to rename them. I want to assign an icon. I am okay if a tab takes up two vertical lines to make it entirely readable. There was an element of something really useful in MS 'Metro' UI -- just the fact that there could be variations in size of target/icon/links. I currently 'pin' my mail and notes tab. These exist as specific functional tabs -- let me style them a bit differently or something.

I tried it out and it seems clear that vertical tabs without titles create too much friction for daily driving a browser where you have many tabs open, hover thumbnails or not.

For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.

Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.

I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.

Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.

But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.

Naive question, why are vertical tabs in the sidebar desirable?

I tried TST once but didn’t get why they were bettter than horizontal tabs. I might be missing something.

I don't care much about vertical tabs but what I want from tabs is automatic grouping by site. I'm surprised nobody made this. I know there are extension supporting grouping but i have never seen any that automatically groups by website.

I wish it supported using the mouse wheel to move between tabs, like https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I recently fixed a Firefox bug to allow easier tab management in FF extensions. My hope is that extensions like Tree Style Tab or Sidebery benefit from my improvements. I love them!

Title: Updated openerTabId is not notified via tabs.onUpdated if it is changed by tabs.update()

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1409262

https://phabricator.services.mozilla.com/D164982#7511767

Just my personal 2c.

I've long been a big fan of Sidebery for vertical tab management, so I was expecting something closer to that than what I got. The vertical tab view does work, although it seems pretty basic. E.g. there's no way to group any of the tabs or modify the display style. By default the tabs come in quite "chunky" as well.

Also, on another note, the toggles at the top of the sidebar keep restarting for me in nightly. I keep unchecking most of them since I don't need any Chatbot integrations or anything like that, but the selection doesn't stick.

Even if this is catch-up with respect with the other browser, I think that this mean that there would finally be a non-hacky way to disable the tab bar (i.e. a toggle rather than something that on userChrome.css).

I'm perfectly happy to have only basic vertical tab functionality on vanilla Firefox and Tree Style Tabs or Sideberry for power users. Presumably there would also be API that makes the life of piro (main dev of TST) and mbnuqw (main dev of Sideberry) easier ?

I wish that blog post showed a screenshot of these features so that I didn't have to go download the nightly just to see what they look like.

I remember old Opera had a sidebar and vertical tabs (same as current Vivaldi). Opera was always way ahead of UX of all browsers.

On version 129 I've been playing with the CSS to make the tabs wider and thinner. Because of some code in tabbrowser.js I couldn't work around with css, it needs user_pref("ui.prefersReducedMotion", 1) for changing max width to not break tab closing.

https://gist.github.com/digitalsignalperson/7e5d4a44fbd7427a...

screenshot: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

Firefox already has a sidebar and a selection of extensions which put tabs in it, also adding many extra conveniences. For example on the computer I am now using to write this I use Tab Center Reborn which also adds a tab filter field which is very handy.

How about an option to disable tabs altogether and use a "one-tab-window" instead? Like we used to have before. I already have a WM able to handle this. I don't need another level of window management with its own logic and shortcuts.

I tried this but unfortunately you do not gain any vertical space as the tab bar is still in use as window title bar (or whatever the proper names are for this). The vertical tab bar is also fixed width (!) and to top it off, after testing nightly for an hour, I closed and reopened the browser and my pinned tabs were gone.

I will wait until they figured this out properly. I know it's "nightly" and "labs" so not a complaint per se, but an observation.

I just tried it, and it is not worth it, it just shows flat column of favicons without titles, it is better to install TreeStyleTab and disable OS window titlebar like this https://i.imgur.com/jnEXiPU.png so address bar in custom titlebar height is only 34px. I hate material design that still echoes useless whitespace everywhere.

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

On Chrome, I solve my too-many-tab issues with an extension [0] that closes the LRU tab once a threshold is reached (10 for me). I find the tabs I need are open and wide enough, and the tabs that autoclose were not useful anymore. About once a month I'm doing a research task where I actually want many tabs and I turn it off temporarily.

[0] - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/max-tabs/ghhcibaghj...

Really glad to see native support for this being worked on, however in its current state it's unusable for me and I'll continue using Sideberry. I constantly use tab grouping and I want to see at a glance what the tab is about, so having text title be visible is a must - having just favicons won't cut it when I have 20 GitHub and 10 StackOverflow links open.

UPD: I saw that there's a way to enable text titles - that's much better. Still, without grouping it would be too painful to use for me.

As a happy Tree Style Tabs user, this is wonderful. I'm using it together with containers for 8 different accounts I have registered for different Google accs, keeping them open all the time. Firefox is a great "co-pilot" browser in this regard.

For some reason, I just remembered that OS/2 put window tabs on the side. Though looking at a screenshot now [1], I didn't remember it was done in a skeuomorphic, 3D way, which definitely takes away from their usefulness. Still, what's old is new again.

1. https://files.support.epson.com/htmldocs/c82422/c82422rf/ima...

Vertical tabs are fine, but this seems like catching up up with the other browsers.

I wished Firefox had natively supported tabs like in "Tree Style Tab" extensions. The extension is great, but out of the box it breaks some assumptions where the tabs appear and how they behave. I alway have to figure out which option to change after I install it. Having something native and polished would be a huge selling point for Firefox.

I never cared about vertical tabs, but I know that this is something that many people have wanted for a very long time. How long has this been actively in the works? Is it just a coincidence that this finally got done only after all the negative press Firefox got following their pivot to becoming an AdTech company which generates revenue through the constant surveillance of its users?

A mandatory comment of the single most important tabs related feature, called "Simple tab groups" extension. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/simple-tab-gr...

The rest IMO is just nice to have.

What I find interesting, and hoping it will be integrated in future releases - easy feature toggling from Settings page. Firefox, please, allow me to turn off all the features that I do not use or do not want to clutter my toolbars with. I'll be happy with "opt-out" variant here, but my selected preference must stick and not be reset on next update.

If you have the Container Tabs add-on, you can also pull up a basic tab sidebar with F2 until this is released in the main version.

Nice to see this finally come up, but it's going to take a while until it catches up with Sidebery or even TST

I'd love to use Firefox, but I've been missing three (subjectively, for me) important features:

1. vertical tabs (now happening, yay!)

2. either tab grouping or workspaces (brave/edge vs. vivaldi style)

3. easy sync-and-restore of tabs/groups/workspaces across my devices

Do you know of a good solution for 2 and more importantly, 3?

Yay, finally! It's not there yet in terms of functionality, but it's a step in the right direction.

Do I understand this correctly that there is no new second sidebar, just the old sidebar, looking slightly different? And the new vertical tabs are just an inferior version of the already existing addons? Are there at least new APIs or bugfixes, so other addons get some benefit from this?

I like minimalism and use ZenFox (an ArcFox extension fork) to have an uncluttered Firefox interface with optional tabs sidebar. But it still needs many configuration to heavily modify the UI. Hope this new functionality is only the first step making Firefox more flexible !

Pretty terrible compared to edge, with edge you can hide the top bar if you're using vertical tabs, which actually make it fit a purpose, you have more horizontal space, but you can't with firefox, they also don't show labels

Microsoft Edge has had this for some time. I was surprised, but Edge is pretty modern.

Someone who had once reached maybe regular 3 digit number of tabs to barely 10 often I now understand that browser and tab power-use is having as few tabs possible. It's like Inbox Zero thing for me, minus the fad angle.

I wish Firefox was like Vivaldi so I can switch from the Chrome based browser.

Why don’t they lay out browser tabs the full width of the window in a vertical accordion so long webpage titles (usually containing more than 100's of characters) can be completely visible at glance?

I really really want this to be a part of firefox, but they should have waited to blog about it until it spent a litle more time in the oven. First impressions were not great, on a number of fronts:

- i could not for the life of me get the tabs to be anything other than the favicons. i tried the suggestion to show sidebar, but that option was not available.

- toggling the setting resulted in duplicate menu bar entries that didn't make sense (macos)

I know how these things go. It's always gritty when things start, and it's nightly, but the post about it got my hopes up and what I played around with was not that usable at all. Will definitely wait patiently for this to come together, and I'm really grateful that it seems to be happening.

For me, the killer feature in vertical tab extensions (STG, Sidebery) is the ability to distribute tabs in groups by URLs automatically. I wonder if FF is going to support this natively.

Their integration looks sloppy compared to Tree Style Tabs but I hope that I can separately disable top side tabs without enabling this because there are already plugins that are superior.

I wish they'd gone with [Compact Tabs] a-la Safari instead of Vertical Tabs a-la Edge. A unified tab and address bar is just so much more elegant and versatile. After switching back from MacOS to Windows, it's only thing I truly miss. Vertical tabs just seem like a transitional step.

[Compact Tabs]: https://9to5mac.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2021/06/Scree...

I was going to praise Firefox for doing something good for once, but I checked it out to be sure. Good thing I did.

- The tabs aren’t tree-style (this is the main reason to use vertical tabs in the first place)

- The space on the top isn’t reclaimed (this would be the USP over just using Sidebery)

- It’s nice (or, not really) to see that Sidebery sometimes not opening isn’t actually a Sidebery bug, but a Firefox bug that affects every sidebar user. I experienced it within the first minute and needed to restart the browser. Knowing the project there’s probably been a bug on it that hasn’t been worked on for a decade. They badly need to fix so much before thinking about new features.

Not in the developer/beta edition yet.

I'm concerned it will conflict with Tree Style Tabs, and/or my custom UI CSS.

But it will be very nice to bring more folks into the Vertical Tabs Cult ;)

Just tried it. Using it as I type. Works and looks very well already! Can be both expanded or no text and with the Nightly preview feature it is very usable.

One thing I like from Tree Tabs that others usually don’t is folders. I find it useful to group and collapse them as needed. Hopefully they’ll add that.

I've just updated my Firefox and I got the options in about:config to enable vertical tabs.

sidebar.revamp and sidebar.verticalTabs need to be set to true.

I can't imagine a proper keybinding subsystem coming any time soon, but it's hard not to wish. Patching omni.ja sucks

I like minimalism so I made ZenFox (an ArcFox extension fork) and it uses vertical tabs. Maybe time to rework it to use this instead !

Vertical tab: this is the 1st in my wishlist. I switched to Vivaldi before because of this. Can't wait to try it out.

How do you nest one tab under another? If you can't, I'll keep using the Tree Style Tab extension instead.

Good step, but still far away from vivaldi in terms of customization without installation of different plugins

I just really want Tab Groups.

This is a nice step forward.

I've been using TreeStyleTab for a long time. Interested to see if this will make it obsolete.

I love the mozilla UI for restoring all tabs after a crash. I wish I could see that regularly.

Sigh... No, Mozilla, this is not what we wanted. We already have 500 sidebar tab extensions. We wanted horizontal tab groupings. It's not that unreasonable. I've been following this issue for 3 years now and this is what they cough out? I'm over it. I'm moving on. So frustrating.

Great. All I need a native split screen just like in Edge in FF.

How about a screenshot.

Looks cool, enter key in GPT prompt box not working...

It's so bad compared to Sideberry. But hey, yet another way to view bookmarks and synced tabs that don't expose actually important functionality. Do they at least have the courage to excise Firefox View or whatever that useless pile was called?

And not a single screenshot was provided.

Some pictures of it might be nice! :)

Tab Mix Plus remains unsurpassed.

I’d rather have tab groups.

no tree mode, but good start

Native vim integration

The future has arrived. Firefox delivered another feature nobody asked for. Great, keep going, the future is bright.