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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 implementa

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

jwells89 2y ago
The unfortunate thing is that Firefox could be the perfect platform for browser UI experimentation if more care were put into making the project easier to fork and reasonable to keep up to date with mainline. A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.
- lofenfew 2y ago
  The truly unfortunate thing is that it was the perfect such platform, then they took it away in the name of security.
- fabrice_d 2y ago
  Some forks are using a nice patch based system: see how the Zen browser is built for instance (https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/ https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/). I think that's a better model than merging upstream updates into your own branch.
buo 2y ago
I think the best vertical tabs implementation in firefox is Sidebery. The use of "panes" to group tabs is brilliant. Older versions were buggy, but version 5 has been rock solid for me. https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery
- sigio 2y ago
  Can't agree more, have been using sidebery for about a month now, and even completely dropped chromium which I ran beside firefox for the last years to only running firefox with sideberry and container-tabs now.
  - diggan 2y ago
    I've been using vertical tabs (first TreeStyleTabs, now Sideberry for the last ~6 months) and I'm in the same boat. Chrome is faster, snappier and works better on more websites I commonly use, but the fact that I cannot have "vertical tabs as trees" ruins the entire browser experience for me, so it's basically the only reason I use Firefox for the last decade or something.
    - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
      Add NoScript and Firefox will be much faster than Chrome. It will make you aware of how much untrusted code poorly developed sites expect you to run on their behalf.
      - diggan 2y ago
        Well, turn off JavaScript in Chrome and you back to Chrome being faster. Turning off JS is obviously not a solution when the complaint is that (assuming the same amount of work) Chrome is faster for some JS.
        kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
        NoScript doesn't turn off javascript. It allows you to selectively disable some scripts while whitelisting others. You can't use much of the modern web without JS but you can neuter the dozens of trackers and ad bloat some sites insist on running on your computer.
        diggan 2y ago
FuturisticGoo 2y ago
> ... it does have groups and profiles. You probably know this, but Firefox has its own version of profiles, although its a bit hidden. You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window. I do agree that this needs a better UI
- sigio 2y ago
  Container tabs are a much more powerful alternative to 'profiles'. Profiles are nice for multiple people sharing a pc/account, container-tabs are for seperating online persona's or work/private browsing
  - chupasaurus 2y ago
    Container tabs are much less powerful alternative because they don't have separate history, extensions and settings.
burkaman 2y ago
FYI you also need a bit of custom CSS to get rid of the title bar if you want to replicate this screenshot. By default if you turn on vertical tabs you still have an empty title bar across the top.
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.
Tagbert 2y ago
FF has said that they are finally adding groups, too, but I haven't heard anything about the timing of that. I'm really looking forward to that as I currently use a plugin for that and would love to drop the third-party plugin for something native. I'm always worried about the risk of a third-party plugin like that with such broad access. I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.
- elchangri 2y ago
  It's called "Tab Containers" and Firefox was the first browser to have the feature
  - JasonSage 2y ago
    Parent is talking about Tab Groups, not Tab Containers.
  - DrammBA 2y ago
    Can those "tab containers" be collapsed into 1 "fake" tab with the container name and uncollapsed back into full tabs by clicking on that "fake" tab?
  - emaro 2y ago
    Containers separate context for the websites, e.g. you can log in to the same site with different account at the same time. Simple Tab Groups separates context for the user, i.e. hides the tabs of inactive groups (while also supporting containers). It's not the same thing.
    - Todays10k 2y ago
      I don't quite see them that way either, but, I further see tab grouping, tab hiding and profile groups as three separate parts of the same overall feature. And Simple Tab Groups directly supported Containers since day 1, so I personally always really found this distinction a bit more lexical than practical. I absolutely love the hiding feature and find Containers incomplete without them. What's the point of switching context if the context is still visible there at all times? At that point, let me just use a different User. And I'd find Simple Tab Groups weirdly incomplete as well if they insisted on hiding tabs but not providing Container functionality. Because tab groups with hiding don't feel "ephemeral" enough. Takes too long to make a group, and the interface changes too much when jumping around. That dissuades me from going on tangents online and then grouping that tangent and keeping it on the side temporarily. Chrome's approach is better for that latter thing. I want something in between. Something that let's you see all groups on a single bar or on a tree bar, and then further groups that can be containers and switch the bar. Chrome was close with their group save+hide feature, but they eat into the bookmarks bar with no options about where.
BiteCode_dev 2y ago
They have tab containers though.
misswaterfairy 2y ago
http://archive.is/uzj4z http://archive.is/uzj4z
worble 2y ago
> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more. I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
- persnickety 2y ago
  On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better. But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
  - akkartik 2y ago
    > on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving? My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible. We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
    - persnickety 2y ago
      I'm using Firefox. I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history. I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff. I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are. On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge. I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
attendant3446 2y ago
Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly. But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.
- dizhn 2y ago
  After a certain number Chromium based browsers stop showing the new tabs.
  - krzyk 2y ago
    And usually stop working because they used up all the memory. I went back to Firefox after a week of using Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with my 100+ open tabs.
- ReadCarlBarks 2y ago
  They're working on a profile switcher: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Can’t you change the user profile in the command line with a flag? Surprised it takes this long to implement that in a gui fashion.
    - fabrice_d 2y ago
      There's already a GUI (launch firefox with the --profileManager command line flag), but it's very barebone.
      - morsch 2y ago
        This flag and the UI seems to go back to (at least) Netscape 7 in 2002, btw.
stiltzkin 2y ago
Waterfox has vertical tabs
stemlord 2y ago
Great now they just need to add back a dedicated grab-zone along the top of the window
- Vinnl 2y ago
  Right click on the empty area next to the address bar, click "Customise Toolbar...", then in the bottom left-hand corner you can toggle the Title Bar.
eviks 2y ago
Vivaldi is very far ahead, and it has vertical tabs, not sure how Chrome is the only comparator for a niche browser
supriyo-biswas 2y ago
The current implementation still leaves in the tab bar at the top at least on Macs. I hope they iron these bugs out before their stable release.
- Vinnl 2y ago
  The bottom button in the sidebar ("Customize sidebar") allows you to turn off the tab bar at the top.
jorvi 2y ago
> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year? On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone. Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.
- encom 2y ago
  I've liked Vivaldi a lot, including it's support for vertical tabs which I consider essential at this point. And they don't constantly mess around with the UI for no reason, unlike Chrome and Firefox. My main major gripe with it, is that it's closed source. I can see Brave is at least MPL, so I think I'll take a look at it.
- yellowapple 2y ago
  Firefox has had vertical tabs for more than a decade now. It just required an add-on until now.
- sham1 2y ago
  [flagged]
mchem 2y ago
In case it helps any reader, I recently discovered the [cmd + shift + a] / [control + shift + a] shortcut in chrome for ‘vertical tabs-ish’ in searchable form
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
RunSet 2y ago
> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed. In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.
andrepd 2y ago
Changing things just for the sake of changing them is the great bane of modern software. Consistency is a valuable feature! Don't throw it away without a VERY good reason! Meaning improving things is fine, changing them just for the sake of what some SV arsehole things is "modern" and "fresh" is not.

jwells89 2y ago

The unfortunate thing is that Firefox could be the perfect platform for browser UI experimentation if more care were put into making the project easier to fork and reasonable to keep up to date with mainline. A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.

lofenfew 2y ago
The truly unfortunate thing is that it was the perfect such platform, then they took it away in the name of security.
fabrice_d 2y ago
Some forks are using a nice patch based system: see how the Zen browser is built for instance (https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/ https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/). I think that's a better model than merging upstream updates into your own branch.

buo 2y ago

I think the best vertical tabs implementation in firefox is Sidebery. The use of "panes" to group tabs is brilliant. Older versions were buggy, but version 5 has been rock solid for me. https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

sigio 2y ago
Can't agree more, have been using sidebery for about a month now, and even completely dropped chromium which I ran beside firefox for the last years to only running firefox with sideberry and container-tabs now.
- diggan 2y ago
  I've been using vertical tabs (first TreeStyleTabs, now Sideberry for the last ~6 months) and I'm in the same boat. Chrome is faster, snappier and works better on more websites I commonly use, but the fact that I cannot have "vertical tabs as trees" ruins the entire browser experience for me, so it's basically the only reason I use Firefox for the last decade or something.
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    Add NoScript and Firefox will be much faster than Chrome. It will make you aware of how much untrusted code poorly developed sites expect you to run on their behalf.
    - diggan 2y ago
      Well, turn off JavaScript in Chrome and you back to Chrome being faster. Turning off JS is obviously not a solution when the complaint is that (assuming the same amount of work) Chrome is faster for some JS.
      - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
        NoScript doesn't turn off javascript. It allows you to selectively disable some scripts while whitelisting others. You can't use much of the modern web without JS but you can neuter the dozens of trackers and ad bloat some sites insist on running on your computer.
        diggan 2y ago

FuturisticGoo 2y ago

> ... it does have groups and profiles. You probably know this, but Firefox has its own version of profiles, although its a bit hidden. You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window. I do agree that this needs a better UI

sigio 2y ago
Container tabs are a much more powerful alternative to 'profiles'. Profiles are nice for multiple people sharing a pc/account, container-tabs are for seperating online persona's or work/private browsing
- chupasaurus 2y ago
  Container tabs are much less powerful alternative because they don't have separate history, extensions and settings.

burkaman 2y ago

FYI you also need a bit of custom CSS to get rid of the title bar if you want to replicate this screenshot. By default if you turn on vertical tabs you still have an empty title bar across the top.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated How can a UI stagnante? If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Tagbert 2y ago

FF has said that they are finally adding groups, too, but I haven't heard anything about the timing of that. I'm really looking forward to that as I currently use a plugin for that and would love to drop the third-party plugin for something native. I'm always worried about the risk of a third-party plugin like that with such broad access. I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.

elchangri 2y ago
It's called "Tab Containers" and Firefox was the first browser to have the feature
- JasonSage 2y ago
  Parent is talking about Tab Groups, not Tab Containers.
- DrammBA 2y ago
  Can those "tab containers" be collapsed into 1 "fake" tab with the container name and uncollapsed back into full tabs by clicking on that "fake" tab?
- emaro 2y ago
  Containers separate context for the websites, e.g. you can log in to the same site with different account at the same time. Simple Tab Groups separates context for the user, i.e. hides the tabs of inactive groups (while also supporting containers). It's not the same thing.
  - Todays10k 2y ago
    I don't quite see them that way either, but, I further see tab grouping, tab hiding and profile groups as three separate parts of the same overall feature. And Simple Tab Groups directly supported Containers since day 1, so I personally always really found this distinction a bit more lexical than practical. I absolutely love the hiding feature and find Containers incomplete without them. What's the point of switching context if the context is still visible there at all times? At that point, let me just use a different User. And I'd find Simple Tab Groups weirdly incomplete as well if they insisted on hiding tabs but not providing Container functionality. Because tab groups with hiding don't feel "ephemeral" enough. Takes too long to make a group, and the interface changes too much when jumping around. That dissuades me from going on tangents online and then grouping that tangent and keeping it on the side temporarily. Chrome's approach is better for that latter thing. I want something in between. Something that let's you see all groups on a single bar or on a tree bar, and then further groups that can be containers and switch the bar. Chrome was close with their group save+hide feature, but they eat into the bookmarks bar with no options about where.

BiteCode_dev 2y ago

They have tab containers though.

misswaterfairy 2y ago

http://archive.is/uzj4z http://archive.is/uzj4z

worble 2y ago

> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more. I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".

persnickety 2y ago
On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better. But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
- akkartik 2y ago
  > on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience. Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving? My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible. We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
  - persnickety 2y ago
    I'm using Firefox. I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history. I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff. I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are. On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge. I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.

attendant3446 2y ago

Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly. But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.

dizhn 2y ago
After a certain number Chromium based browsers stop showing the new tabs.
- krzyk 2y ago
  And usually stop working because they used up all the memory. I went back to Firefox after a week of using Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with my 100+ open tabs.
ReadCarlBarks 2y ago
They're working on a profile switcher: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re-working-on-in-firefox/td-p/57694 https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/here-s-what-we-re...
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Can’t you change the user profile in the command line with a flag? Surprised it takes this long to implement that in a gui fashion.
  - fabrice_d 2y ago
    There's already a GUI (launch firefox with the --profileManager command line flag), but it's very barebone.
    - morsch 2y ago
      This flag and the UI seems to go back to (at least) Netscape 7 in 2002, btw.

stiltzkin 2y ago

Waterfox has vertical tabs

stemlord 2y ago

Great now they just need to add back a dedicated grab-zone along the top of the window

Vinnl 2y ago
Right click on the empty area next to the address bar, click "Customise Toolbar...", then in the bottom left-hand corner you can toggle the Title Bar.

eviks 2y ago

Vivaldi is very far ahead, and it has vertical tabs, not sure how Chrome is the only comparator for a niche browser

supriyo-biswas 2y ago

The current implementation still leaves in the tab bar at the top at least on Macs. I hope they iron these bugs out before their stable release.

Vinnl 2y ago
The bottom button in the sidebar ("Customize sidebar") allows you to turn off the tab bar at the top.

jorvi 2y ago

> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year? On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/ https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone. Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.

encom 2y ago
I've liked Vivaldi a lot, including it's support for vertical tabs which I consider essential at this point. And they don't constantly mess around with the UI for no reason, unlike Chrome and Firefox. My main major gripe with it, is that it's closed source. I can see Brave is at least MPL, so I think I'll take a look at it.
yellowapple 2y ago
Firefox has had vertical tabs for more than a decade now. It just required an add-on until now.
sham1 2y ago
[flagged]

mchem 2y ago

In case it helps any reader, I recently discovered the [cmd + shift + a] / [control + shift + a] shortcut in chrome for ‘vertical tabs-ish’ in searchable form

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

RunSet 2y ago

> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed. In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.

andrepd 2y ago

Changing things just for the sake of changing them is the great bane of modern software. Consistency is a valuable feature! Don't throw it away without a VERY good reason! Meaning improving things is fine, changing them just for the sake of what some SV arsehole things is "modern" and "fresh" is not.