8 ms·

To each their own, but: I strongly believe the opposite. Of course having more than 6 or 8 tabs open in a horizontal tab bar makes tabs difficult to manage and

by 015a 3y ago

To each their own, but: I strongly believe the opposite. Of course having more than 6 or 8 tabs open in a horizontal tab bar makes tabs difficult to manage and track. I've used Arc for the past 6 months. Having 6 or 8 tabs open in a vertical tab bar is also difficult to manage or track. I end up just spam-closing all of them and starting fresh pretty much every 4 hours anyway. Here's the two arguments I've heard that I resonate more with, one in either direction. (1) Count the number of pixels dedicated to the tab bar space when it is horizontal versus vertical. I've never seen a functional vertical tab bar that used the same or fewer pixels than a horizontal one. (2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios; it feels untrue, to me, at the 16:10 aspect ratio; and unfortunately, this is an extremely common aspect ratio as its ~the aspect ratio Macbooks are made at.

J_Shelby_J 3y ago
When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.
- jwells89 3y ago
  > chrome was made for small screen laptop users Makes sense if one considers how many 13” Macbooks and original MacBook Airs were likely being toted around the Google campus in the late 2000s, with Macs being the predominant development platform there at the time. Further down the road in 2011, Chromebooks appeared, most of which are on the smaller side which also acts as incentive to keep Chrome usable on smaller screens. Desktop Safari and MS Edge are also decent in this regard, likely a result of their parent companies being makers of popular small-screen computers.
DonHopkins 3y ago
It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few? While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key. But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want. Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!
- hulitu 3y ago
  > But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, Please don't tell that to UX experts. They will replace all four with a hamburgher menu. /s
- 015a 3y ago
  I agree that it is odd, even from an "efficient market hypothesis" angle. There are people who use Arc literally only because of the very well-integrated and implemented vertical tab bar (versus, oftentimes jank & ugly addons in Firefox/Chrome). In other words, we (humanity) have to create and maintain an entire new browser just to solve this one problem for users that could, very easily, be a checkbox in a settings menu. Same with Windows 11; I know one person who refuses to upgrade literally only because the Windows 11 taskbar is bottom-of-monitor only; they don't support moving it to the left or right-hand side of the monitor. Its actually unhinged. Our industry was filled with years, decades even, where we were so excited and proud to build things to be as powerful as possible, to do as much as possible. Nowadays, companies want to build the least they can possibly get away with. Its sad what we've lost.
- jsrcout 3y ago
  I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest amount of white space. The results beggar belief. Edit: Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use. In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done. But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size. Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis. Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?
michaelmrose 3y ago
If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal space for an apples to apples comparison.
pxc 3y ago
> (2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios This is true, and as a vertical tab bar user, it's important to me. However, when every app follows this logic and decides it gets to have a sidebar (or two!), all of a sudden I'm looking at a lot of apps that are barely usable unless they're maximized. I often find myself thinking 'hey, fuck you, $APP! those pixels are for my vertical tab bar!!'

by 015a 3y ago

J_Shelby_J 3y ago

When chrome first started getting popular many Firefox users were on vertical tabs, and it was not lost on me that chrome was made for small screen laptop users. A smart design decision even if it feels gimped for vertical tab users.

jwells89 3y ago
> chrome was made for small screen laptop users Makes sense if one considers how many 13” Macbooks and original MacBook Airs were likely being toted around the Google campus in the late 2000s, with Macs being the predominant development platform there at the time. Further down the road in 2011, Chromebooks appeared, most of which are on the smaller side which also acts as incentive to keep Chrome usable on smaller screens. Desktop Safari and MS Edge are also decent in this regard, likely a result of their parent companies being makers of popular small-screen computers.

DonHopkins 3y ago

It bewilders me that any rational UI designer would be so arrogant as to make the unilateral unchangeable decision for all their users that they should only have tabs on one side, be it the top, bottom, left or right of the window. Why restrict users to using tabs on only one side and one side only? What's so special about that side, and bad about the other sides? What if the user is left handed, or has a tall monitor, or a wide monitor, or lots of windows, or only a few? While you're at it, why not just remove all the arrow keys from the keyboard except one? Then users can argue over whether the left-arrow key is better than the up-arrow key, and users who don't like having only an up-arrow key can buy a keyboard with only a left-arrow key. But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, so there are no arguments about which arrow is better: you just use whichever arrow you want, whenever you want. Most people prefer to use all four arrows at different times for different purposes, and put their tabs along all four edges, too!

hulitu 3y ago
> But all keyboards have all four arrow keys, Please don't tell that to UX experts. They will replace all four with a hamburgher menu. /s
015a 3y ago
I agree that it is odd, even from an "efficient market hypothesis" angle. There are people who use Arc literally only because of the very well-integrated and implemented vertical tab bar (versus, oftentimes jank & ugly addons in Firefox/Chrome). In other words, we (humanity) have to create and maintain an entire new browser just to solve this one problem for users that could, very easily, be a checkbox in a settings menu. Same with Windows 11; I know one person who refuses to upgrade literally only because the Windows 11 taskbar is bottom-of-monitor only; they don't support moving it to the left or right-hand side of the monitor. Its actually unhinged. Our industry was filled with years, decades even, where we were so excited and proud to build things to be as powerful as possible, to do as much as possible. Nowadays, companies want to build the least they can possibly get away with. Its sad what we've lost.
jsrcout 3y ago
I, too, remember when GUIs (not UXs!) respected the user's desires, workflow and general agency. That's not entirely gone yet, but it's going. Heck, Office 365 updated lately and now I have this ongoing little contest of displaying the tiniest number of coworker Teams comments in the hugest amount of white space. The results beggar belief. Edit: Teams (it's a Chrome browser window, but that's not really relevant to my rant) is taking up like two square feet on a 4K monitor, and 3-6 messages plus links to a couple attachments are all it will show me - along with enough white space for another 300 channel names (but only channel names, nothing else), headings the size of movie trailers, just oceans of space and garbage I don't need and can't use. In an ideal world, there'd be some way to adjust the layout a bit, and in fact when we used Slack before Teams, that was pretty easy: you move the divider between channel names and messages to the left, thus giving less space to channel names, more space to message content. Done. But that's too much power to allow a user to have, in these modern, enlightened times. So while Teams has such a divider, there's no provision to adjust it. Want to see more than a handful of messages at the same time? Gonna need a bigger monitor. Probably 55" would be a good size. Of course, that's one example out of a billion. It's not that software won't cater to my particular workflow... it's is that software no longer allows me to make reasonable adjustments to support a workflow that works for me, and in fact removes still-remaining means to do so on a regular basis. Really it's the whole "you're holding it wrong" mindset that I get so tired of. We all labor under our own constraints and just a little leeway on basic customization goes a very long way to making software more usable. Just let me view more than six messages at once, ok? Please?

michaelmrose 3y ago

If you squish vertical tabs so as to have as few characters shown as horizontal tabs you'll have plenty of horizontal space for an apples to apples comparison.

pxc 3y ago

> (2) But: Monitors almost always have more horizontal pixels than vertical pixels. So, actually, a vertical tab bar better-leverages the aspect ratio your monitor is built at. This feels true at 16:9 and greater aspect ratios This is true, and as a vertical tab bar user, it's important to me. However, when every app follows this logic and decides it gets to have a sidebar (or two!), all of a sudden I'm looking at a lot of apps that are barely usable unless they're maximized. I often find myself thinking 'hey, fuck you, $APP! those pixels are for my vertical tab bar!!'