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Off-topic: I've experimented with a new layout in Firefox, and now I can't think of going back. I first installed Tree Style Tab. I then removed the tabs at

*Off-topic:* I've experimented with a new layout in Firefox, and now I can't think of going back. I first installed Tree Style Tab. I then removed the tabs at the top of the window and added a permanent status bar to the bottom of the window using userChrome.css: https://i.imgur.com/PIONywj.png https://i.imgur.com/PIONywj.png (edited to add, my userChrome.css: https://gist.github.com/anthonyclarka2/155c038de96e91894cbd4ba15ee03c86 https://gist.github.com/anthonyclarka2/155c038de96e91894cbd4... ) (EDIT: I added some extra css to this to set the titlebar and system UI buttons - use the first revision if you don't want that) The tree style tabs are wonderful. I can see a grouping of tabs, see which tab is the "parent" of a bunch of pages. I often have a root tab with Jira current sprint, then a ticket sub item, then branching from that I have various documentation and github pages open. All of those pages together form one mental "unit" of related information and work. I'm sorry to post this in a somewhat unrelated thread, but I'm geeked out by how well this works! Firefox is better for my needs anyway, because I can tag bookmarks. Much easier to find saved pages through searching tags for "emacs, babel, python" for instance. Or "firefox, tabs, css" *On-topic:* This move by Google is going to lose them a ton of browser users, I think. People love blocking ads! Especially tech-minded folk, who are often asked to recommend software or repair things for less knowledgeable or comfortable people. I'd also like to see a Chromium fork that continues to allow the Manifest V2 API.

daptaq 5y ago
I tried this too, but as Mozilla has no regard for any customization that are not done via the official graphical configuration interface (and sometimes not even that, considering how the compact UI mode is being removed), you'll have to find out how to fix it every time you update your browser.
- worble 5y ago
  I don't think I've ever updated my userChrome.css file, certainly not in the past few years. The browser chrome is pretty stable since this is how the browser itself is styled, so outside of big UI updates like Proton (which didn't even impact my own css) the chance of breakage is pretty slim.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  I think in the last ~15 years I had to actually update that script once, IIRC that was when Firefox moved to webextensions.
gbrindisi 5y ago
my favourite feature of tree style tab is coloring tabs based on content: yellow search, orange news, green internal stuff etc
- bloopernova 5y ago
  I forgot that this was an option provided by a different extension, was very confused for a moment. Definitely going to give that a try, thank you!
hidden-spyder 5y ago
Off topic question on off topic comment: HN, what are your thoughts on Sidebery? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/
- taysix 5y ago
  Didn't know about this! Looks so much cleaner than the other extension
- bloopernova 5y ago
  It looks really slick, I'll have to look closer at it before giving an opinion.
- cle 5y ago
  I’ve been using it for a while, because I kept having performance and stability problems with TST. Sidebery is much faster for me, I recommend!
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    How did you track down those problems to reside within TST? I've been using it for years with routinely 100's and occasionally thousands of tabs open without any issue whatsoever.
- jorams 5y ago
  Sidebery is great. I do experience one annoying issue: it's unreliable at saving/restoring the tab tree across restarts. Sometimes they end up as a flat list, sometimes not all tabs show up. Closing and re-opening a few times usually fixes most of the problems, but not consistently. That never happened with TST, but it's bearable. Development also seems to have stalled while a big new version is being developed behind closed doors.
- konart 5y ago
  Preferred it while I was still on Firefox (now on Edge)
- 5y ago
taysix 5y ago
This sent me down a good rabbit hole. Ended up finding a simpler userChrome.css that removed the native tabs. I'm sure yours does a lot more cleaning up of the UI but the following worked well for me: https://github.com/taylorsilva/dotfiles#hide-firefoxs-native-tabs https://github.com/taylorsilva/dotfiles#hide-firefoxs-native...
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Oh that is really nice and simple, yeah.
keyb0ardninja 5y ago
I've a similar setup as yours (https://i.imgur.com/D3McL6m.png https://i.imgur.com/D3McL6m.png). You're wasting a bit of vertical space though with that empty titlebar. I turn off the titlebar for all windows in KDE Plasma and add this (https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-buttons https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-buttons) applet to the panel.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Yup, I found some css to merge the system UI buttons into the main UI bar. Thanks for pointing out that was possible!
jsmith99 5y ago
You can save some vertical space by moving the window buttons (minimise/close) into the same row as the omnibox, while also hiding the window title bar like https://imgur.com/a/YbgVgwF https://imgur.com/a/YbgVgwF
- bloopernova 5y ago
  Oh that's slick. Was that all through the customize screen, or was any of it via CSS? Edited to add: I had to add the following to move the system UI buttons to the same "bar" as the rest of the UI in Firefox: /* Adding empty space for buttons */ #nav-bar { margin-right:80px; } /* For dragging whole window by mouse*/ #titlebar { appearance: none !important; height: 7px; } /* Fix for main menu calling by Alt button THIS BREAKS THE UI FOR ME!! */ /* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar { margin-top: 10px; } */ /* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */ #TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container { display: block; position: absolute; top: 17px; right: 1px; } From: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#move-minimizerestoreclose-window-buttons-to-the-right-of-hamburger-menu-after-hiding-horizontal-tabs https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
  - jsmith99 5y ago
    I adapted a theme I think but I can't find the name now. Here is my userchrome https://pastebin.com/8FLgyX1y https://pastebin.com/8FLgyX1y The title bar can be hidden through the customise screen. The gaps on the toolbar by the omnibox are important as they give you something to drag the window by.
frutiger 5y ago
> I'd also like to see a Chromium fork that continues to allow the Manifest V2 API. Maintaining a Chromium fork that deviates from upstream is a full time job that requires about 3-5 engineers. My day job's sibling team maintains such a fork.
- tus666 5y ago
  Isn't it called Brave?
  - ATsch 5y ago
    Preferrably one that is not involved in some kind of cryptocurrency scammery scheme.
    - erulabs 5y ago
      Right so must exactly clone a very very large code base, for free, with no attempt to monetize (must compete with one of the worlds largest corporations with zero inbound resources whatsoever). Must also not attempt to add any features that users want, which may also help generate revenue. How do you expect anyone to take on Google, if when they make a single penny, they're called scammers? Don't let blind hatred of a particular technology bias you. You can think cryptocurrency is stupid, but it's not inherently a scam. Unless you have some proof that Brave is participating in scamming its users, which I would love to see proof of. Anyways I really don't think this kind of mudslinging is appropriate, particularly against a small company which appears to be working to prevent an advertising takeover of the internet. Edit: I posted this in an extremely sarcastic tone, which I apologize for, but this refrain "oh it has a crypto part, COMPANY IS SCAM" is getting extremely tiring and is, dare I say it, a stupid thing to say.
      - nicce 5y ago
        Scam or not, their revenue is still based on ads. Some day there will be a day when user data is too tempting.
      - 5y ago
sdfgsdf 5y ago
Hey, I have my own workflow around tree style tabs + bookmarks (I think several people are re-inventing the same setup independently), but I guess I don't know browsers/css well enough to understand what you described. Explain it like I'm 5: A) to get rid of the top tabs I copy-paste your userChrome.css and put it where?, and B) will that have any other effects?
- bloopernova 5y ago
  A) https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html is one tutorial on userchrome. B) I don't know! :) It's easy to revert though.
  - sdfgsdf 5y ago
    I don't wanna learn userchrome, I just wanna remove top tabs. Thanks for the help though.
zimmund 5y ago
I've combined TST with 1) "Firefox Multi-Account Containers" (to have different "profiles" within the same browser, very useful for personal/work/shopping/etc), 2) "Simple Tab Groups" to be able to switch contexts (social networks time, research, free time reading and news... these are topical groups, different functionality from containers).
- perfectstorm 5y ago
  i love everything about multi-account containers except when it comes managing two google accounts (for work and personal). I can never get them to work proeprly with the number of redirects and whatnot. not sure who to blame here but i hope Firefox comes up with a fix soon.
  - NmAmDa 5y ago
    It would be better to create two profiles in firefox to separate work and personal. And both can be started at the same in two different browser instances if you like.
    - zimmund 5y ago
      This, absolutely. What I mentioned as "work" above is personal work. Keeping work sessions, history and bookmarks separate is better (and probably safer?) than having all in the same browser. This issue is even bigger with Chrome if your work account happens to be managed, as it may take over your browser's settings.
    - perfectstorm 5y ago
      will try that approach. thanks for the idea.
jacquesm 5y ago
I don't think I'd get through my working day without tree style tabs. It is essential.
pmontra 5y ago
Do you use only full screen browser windows? I got the feeling that TST doesn't play nice with narrower windows as it requires a lot of horizontal space. I've got 10 browser windows on 5 different desktops now (8 Firefox, 1 Vivaldi, 1 Chrome). Only 3 of them are full screen, one per browser. The window I'm currently typing it is wide about 2/3 of the screen and it's probably twice as wide as it should be to read HN (the lines are too long to read comfortably.) My screen is 15.6", 16:9.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  I've gotten used to the full screen (or width) windows. Mostly it's because of certain work web UIs that need as much width as possible. I agree with your statement that wide text is difficult to read. In Emacs I use Olivetti mode to narrow my text windows, I should probably do something similar for hackernews or other sites that would benefit from narrower windows. In Firefox, there's reader mode too, which makes things much easier to see.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    Thanks for the hint to Olivetti mode. I usually either split the frame horizontally (C-x 3) to look at multiple buffers side to side or narrow the window. Long lines are bad for programming too.
hetspookjee 5y ago
Weird to see an off topic post being number one in the thread. Good for you and your layout but the on topic comment is as cookie cutter as can be. No shit that tech minded folk like to block ads! I view this post as an attempt to distract from the actual topic.
- quesera 5y ago
  Contrastingly, I think the GP post is the most useful piece of information in response to the posted article, hence my upvote.
- 40four 5y ago
  I don’t believe any comment recommending Firefox is off topic at all for this. For anyone who is worried about losing uBlock functionality in Chrome, the correct answer to that problem is to switch to Firefox. Hence the top two comments right now pertain to Firefox.
- bloopernova 5y ago
  My apologies, it was not my intent to distract from the discussion at hand. I thought my original comment would languish at the bottom of the thread with 1 or 2 votes.
diarrhea 5y ago
TST does look great. Not sure it's usable in my case: - similar to what others mentioned, I'm running a browser at 50% width of fullscreen (27", 4K display). This is ideal for most websites: it's about as narrow as most websites would natively be. However, this means there's no horizontal space left to sacrifice. - I've been hard at work eradicating non-standard/exotic tools/workflows/etc. from my life. Maintainers abandon software regularly and then you're left stranded, perhaps your entire workflow gets turned upside down. Good old regular tabs "just work" and do so everywhere. The more you customize your setup, the more you're stranded on foreign territory. There's value in just getting used to what's there by default, to a degree. TST essentially turns the 1D tab row (let's call it list) into a nested structure. And that really is fantastic. However, I think I'd hope and wait for that to become mainstream and officially integrated and wide-spread, if ever, before relying on it. The usual, top-row tab bar with some 2-dimensional twist seems promising.
nn3 5y ago
Why would it need to be a fork? It would just need a (regular to get security fixes) rebuild with an extra patch applied. Something that Linux distributions do all the time for Chromium. The question is just who could maintain the extra patch.
aasasd 5y ago
My dream of tab management is if the browser would suspend long-unused tabs into a tree-style list—i.e. a bunch of bookmarks in the same arrangement in which I opened the tabs, without overhead of actual tabs. Then, live tabs could also be on the same list. Right now, suspended tabs in FF still take memory and slow the browser down, and are cumbersome to search through. Basically, I'll need to marry Tab Suspender with Tab Session Manager, then perhaps borrow the UI of Tree Style Tabs.

*Off-topic:* I've experimented with a new layout in Firefox, and now I can't think of going back. I first installed Tree Style Tab. I then removed the tabs at

daptaq 5y ago

I tried this too, but as Mozilla has no regard for any customization that are not done via the official graphical configuration interface (and sometimes not even that, considering how the compact UI mode is being removed), you'll have to find out how to fix it every time you update your browser.

worble 5y ago
I don't think I've ever updated my userChrome.css file, certainly not in the past few years. The browser chrome is pretty stable since this is how the browser itself is styled, so outside of big UI updates like Proton (which didn't even impact my own css) the chance of breakage is pretty slim.
cycomanic 5y ago
I think in the last ~15 years I had to actually update that script once, IIRC that was when Firefox moved to webextensions.

gbrindisi 5y ago

my favourite feature of tree style tab is coloring tabs based on content: yellow search, orange news, green internal stuff etc

bloopernova 5y ago
I forgot that this was an option provided by a different extension, was very confused for a moment. Definitely going to give that a try, thank you!

hidden-spyder 5y ago

Off topic question on off topic comment: HN, what are your thoughts on Sidebery? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/

taysix 5y ago
Didn't know about this! Looks so much cleaner than the other extension
bloopernova 5y ago
It looks really slick, I'll have to look closer at it before giving an opinion.
cle 5y ago
I’ve been using it for a while, because I kept having performance and stability problems with TST. Sidebery is much faster for me, I recommend!
- jacquesm 5y ago
  How did you track down those problems to reside within TST? I've been using it for years with routinely 100's and occasionally thousands of tabs open without any issue whatsoever.
jorams 5y ago
Sidebery is great. I do experience one annoying issue: it's unreliable at saving/restoring the tab tree across restarts. Sometimes they end up as a flat list, sometimes not all tabs show up. Closing and re-opening a few times usually fixes most of the problems, but not consistently. That never happened with TST, but it's bearable. Development also seems to have stalled while a big new version is being developed behind closed doors.
konart 5y ago
Preferred it while I was still on Firefox (now on Edge)
5y ago

taysix 5y ago

This sent me down a good rabbit hole. Ended up finding a simpler userChrome.css that removed the native tabs. I'm sure yours does a lot more cleaning up of the UI but the following worked well for me: https://github.com/taylorsilva/dotfiles#hide-firefoxs-native-tabs https://github.com/taylorsilva/dotfiles#hide-firefoxs-native...

bloopernova 5y ago
Oh that is really nice and simple, yeah.

keyb0ardninja 5y ago

I've a similar setup as yours (https://i.imgur.com/D3McL6m.png https://i.imgur.com/D3McL6m.png). You're wasting a bit of vertical space though with that empty titlebar. I turn off the titlebar for all windows in KDE Plasma and add this (https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-buttons https://github.com/psifidotos/applet-window-buttons) applet to the panel.

bloopernova 5y ago
Yup, I found some css to merge the system UI buttons into the main UI bar. Thanks for pointing out that was possible!

jsmith99 5y ago

You can save some vertical space by moving the window buttons (minimise/close) into the same row as the omnibox, while also hiding the window title bar like https://imgur.com/a/YbgVgwF https://imgur.com/a/YbgVgwF

bloopernova 5y ago
Oh that's slick. Was that all through the customize screen, or was any of it via CSS? Edited to add: I had to add the following to move the system UI buttons to the same "bar" as the rest of the UI in Firefox: /* Adding empty space for buttons */ #nav-bar { margin-right:80px; } /* For dragging whole window by mouse*/ #titlebar { appearance: none !important; height: 7px; } /* Fix for main menu calling by Alt button THIS BREAKS THE UI FOR ME!! */ /* #titlebar > #toolbar-menubar { margin-top: 10px; } */ /* Move minimize/restore/close buttons to empty space */ #TabsToolbar > .titlebar-buttonbox-container { display: block; position: absolute; top: 17px; right: 1px; } From: https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-for-custom-style-rules#move-minimizerestoreclose-window-buttons-to-the-right-of-hamburger-menu-after-hiding-horizontal-tabs https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
- jsmith99 5y ago
  I adapted a theme I think but I can't find the name now. Here is my userchrome https://pastebin.com/8FLgyX1y https://pastebin.com/8FLgyX1y The title bar can be hidden through the customise screen. The gaps on the toolbar by the omnibox are important as they give you something to drag the window by.

frutiger 5y ago

> I'd also like to see a Chromium fork that continues to allow the Manifest V2 API. Maintaining a Chromium fork that deviates from upstream is a full time job that requires about 3-5 engineers. My day job's sibling team maintains such a fork.

tus666 5y ago
Isn't it called Brave?
- ATsch 5y ago
  Preferrably one that is not involved in some kind of cryptocurrency scammery scheme.
  - erulabs 5y ago
    Right so must exactly clone a very very large code base, for free, with no attempt to monetize (must compete with one of the worlds largest corporations with zero inbound resources whatsoever). Must also not attempt to add any features that users want, which may also help generate revenue. How do you expect anyone to take on Google, if when they make a single penny, they're called scammers? Don't let blind hatred of a particular technology bias you. You can think cryptocurrency is stupid, but it's not inherently a scam. Unless you have some proof that Brave is participating in scamming its users, which I would love to see proof of. Anyways I really don't think this kind of mudslinging is appropriate, particularly against a small company which appears to be working to prevent an advertising takeover of the internet. Edit: I posted this in an extremely sarcastic tone, which I apologize for, but this refrain "oh it has a crypto part, COMPANY IS SCAM" is getting extremely tiring and is, dare I say it, a stupid thing to say.
    - nicce 5y ago
      Scam or not, their revenue is still based on ads. Some day there will be a day when user data is too tempting.
    - 5y ago

sdfgsdf 5y ago

Hey, I have my own workflow around tree style tabs + bookmarks (I think several people are re-inventing the same setup independently), but I guess I don't know browsers/css well enough to understand what you described. Explain it like I'm 5: A) to get rid of the top tabs I copy-paste your userChrome.css and put it where?, and B) will that have any other effects?

bloopernova 5y ago
A) https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html https://www.userchrome.org/how-create-userchrome-css.html is one tutorial on userchrome. B) I don't know! :) It's easy to revert though.
- sdfgsdf 5y ago
  I don't wanna learn userchrome, I just wanna remove top tabs. Thanks for the help though.

zimmund 5y ago

I've combined TST with 1) "Firefox Multi-Account Containers" (to have different "profiles" within the same browser, very useful for personal/work/shopping/etc), 2) "Simple Tab Groups" to be able to switch contexts (social networks time, research, free time reading and news... these are topical groups, different functionality from containers).

perfectstorm 5y ago
i love everything about multi-account containers except when it comes managing two google accounts (for work and personal). I can never get them to work proeprly with the number of redirects and whatnot. not sure who to blame here but i hope Firefox comes up with a fix soon.
- NmAmDa 5y ago
  It would be better to create two profiles in firefox to separate work and personal. And both can be started at the same in two different browser instances if you like.
  - zimmund 5y ago
    This, absolutely. What I mentioned as "work" above is personal work. Keeping work sessions, history and bookmarks separate is better (and probably safer?) than having all in the same browser. This issue is even bigger with Chrome if your work account happens to be managed, as it may take over your browser's settings.
  - perfectstorm 5y ago
    will try that approach. thanks for the idea.

jacquesm 5y ago

I don't think I'd get through my working day without tree style tabs. It is essential.

pmontra 5y ago

Do you use only full screen browser windows? I got the feeling that TST doesn't play nice with narrower windows as it requires a lot of horizontal space. I've got 10 browser windows on 5 different desktops now (8 Firefox, 1 Vivaldi, 1 Chrome). Only 3 of them are full screen, one per browser. The window I'm currently typing it is wide about 2/3 of the screen and it's probably twice as wide as it should be to read HN (the lines are too long to read comfortably.) My screen is 15.6", 16:9.

bloopernova 5y ago
I've gotten used to the full screen (or width) windows. Mostly it's because of certain work web UIs that need as much width as possible. I agree with your statement that wide text is difficult to read. In Emacs I use Olivetti mode to narrow my text windows, I should probably do something similar for hackernews or other sites that would benefit from narrower windows. In Firefox, there's reader mode too, which makes things much easier to see.
- pmontra 5y ago
  Thanks for the hint to Olivetti mode. I usually either split the frame horizontally (C-x 3) to look at multiple buffers side to side or narrow the window. Long lines are bad for programming too.

hetspookjee 5y ago

Weird to see an off topic post being number one in the thread. Good for you and your layout but the on topic comment is as cookie cutter as can be. No shit that tech minded folk like to block ads! I view this post as an attempt to distract from the actual topic.

quesera 5y ago
Contrastingly, I think the GP post is the most useful piece of information in response to the posted article, hence my upvote.
40four 5y ago
I don’t believe any comment recommending Firefox is off topic at all for this. For anyone who is worried about losing uBlock functionality in Chrome, the correct answer to that problem is to switch to Firefox. Hence the top two comments right now pertain to Firefox.
bloopernova 5y ago
My apologies, it was not my intent to distract from the discussion at hand. I thought my original comment would languish at the bottom of the thread with 1 or 2 votes.

diarrhea 5y ago

TST does look great. Not sure it's usable in my case: - similar to what others mentioned, I'm running a browser at 50% width of fullscreen (27", 4K display). This is ideal for most websites: it's about as narrow as most websites would natively be. However, this means there's no horizontal space left to sacrifice. - I've been hard at work eradicating non-standard/exotic tools/workflows/etc. from my life. Maintainers abandon software regularly and then you're left stranded, perhaps your entire workflow gets turned upside down. Good old regular tabs "just work" and do so everywhere. The more you customize your setup, the more you're stranded on foreign territory. There's value in just getting used to what's there by default, to a degree. TST essentially turns the 1D tab row (let's call it list) into a nested structure. And that really is fantastic. However, I think I'd hope and wait for that to become mainstream and officially integrated and wide-spread, if ever, before relying on it. The usual, top-row tab bar with some 2-dimensional twist seems promising.

nn3 5y ago

Why would it need to be a fork? It would just need a (regular to get security fixes) rebuild with an extra patch applied. Something that Linux distributions do all the time for Chromium. The question is just who could maintain the extra patch.

aasasd 5y ago

My dream of tab management is if the browser would suspend long-unused tabs into a tree-style list—i.e. a bunch of bookmarks in the same arrangement in which I opened the tabs, without overhead of actual tabs. Then, live tabs could also be on the same list. Right now, suspended tabs in FF still take memory and slow the browser down, and are cumbersome to search through. Basically, I'll need to marry Tab Suspender with Tab Session Manager, then perhaps borrow the UI of Tree Style Tabs.