4 ms·

I've been liking the new vertical tabs too.

by kryptn 1y ago

evanb 1y ago
It's so much better than any of the extension-based XUL interface hacks. As soon as they can figure out when to auto-expand the sidebar it will be perfect.
- throw10920 1y ago
  Firefox moved away from XUL extensions years ago - they now use a well-defined WebExtension model that is kind of the opposite of hacky.
  - wtallis 1y ago
    And yet, many of the extensions that in the XUL days could cleanly change the browser's UI now have a much more hacky user experience.
    - throw10920 1y ago
      Yes, because the APIs aren't perfectly fleshed-out. And they may never be, and yet that's still completely OK because the WebExtension model is obviously better along the performance, security, portability, and API stability axes.
      - wtallis 1y ago
        WebExtensions aren't clearly better from a performance standpoint. Performance won by removing useful features doesn't count.
        throw10920 1y ago
        This is blatantly false, and one of the most dishonest and manipulative claims that I've seen on HN. Performance is performance. If one technology is more performant by removing features, useful or not, it it factually faster, and that performance absolutely does count. Features are completely irrelevant to performance measurements of a system. If you have two cars, car A with top speed 160 MPH and a 0-60 of 3s, and car be with top speech 120 MPH and a 0-60 of 5s, some people may still prefer car B because it has better mileage or nicer features or is cheaper (which is the overall value judgement that you seem to be extremely confused about), but precisely zero sane people will tell you that car A "isn't clearly better from a speed standpoint" because it has less features than car B.
        wtallis 1y ago
        Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. Aside from crippling ad blockers, are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions, or is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact?
        throw10920 1y ago
        > Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. OK, so now you're moving the goalposts, continuing to dishonestly redefine words, and cherry-picking specific instances of addons that support your point, while ignoring the fact that I soundly refuted your utterly insane previous argument. > Aside from crippling ad blockers No? WebExtensions clearly did not "cripple" ad blockers by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe you're conflating WebExtensions and Manifest v3? > Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. Cherry-picking items to try to support your point only proves that you don't have robust evidence to support it in general. This is the hasty generalizations fallacy. As someone who lived through the WebExtensions transition, I didn't perceive any slowdown in any of my dozen or so extensions. > are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions Yes - if you had any knowledge at all of the old addon model, you'd know that the old XUL-based addons prevented Firefox's move to the multi-process Electrolysis architecture, which significantly improved performance. > is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact Yes, that is (on top of everything else) a performance benefit. Humans are not robots - all humans write bad and buggy code, and the XUL model not only made it much easier to write buggy and slow code, but the lack of a well-defined interface resulted in ossification that massively inhibited Mozilla's ability to develop Firefox.Even if it didn't, making changes that help/force the lower 99% of programmers to write better code while mildly inhibiting the ability of the top 1% of of programmers is absolutely worth it, and in practice has massively improved performance. If you tried to run old Firefox on a modern CPU with a bunch of extensions, you'd very clearly see the performance difference due to the ability to actually take full advantage of more than one core, and due to the improvements that Mozilla was able to make by deprecating the old API. Perhaps stop commenting unless you can stop committing numerous fallacies, making utterly insane statements, pretending that human factors don't exist, and making statements about things that you have no understanding of.
- bool3max 1y ago
  When’s the last time you used an extension of such kind? Sidebery for example doesn’t seem hacky at all to me.
snapplebobapple 1y ago
How does it compare to sidebery? I use the vertical tabs on that and quite like it but only found them because of another feature, per container socks5 (one for local ip and a few to strategically placed cheap vps to override my network default mullvad vpn tunneling as needed)
- onli 1y ago
  Sideberry is still better since it's hierarchical, so tabs are nested. But maybe the tab groups change that? Now or in a future iteration?
  - Vinnl 1y ago
    Yeah vertical tabs with tab groups have replaced Sidebery's hierarchy and panels for me. Mostly because it feels slightly smoother and more performant as a built-in feature.
    - pantulis 1y ago
      Sidebery is awesome but afaik it doesn't seem that it syncs the state of your tabs across browsers. TabStash is not as visually polished but it achieves that capability by using Firefox bookmarks for the tabs and groups.
- phito 1y ago
  I like it better than sideberry/treestyletab, but I was not using the hierarchical feature of those two. It's just simpler and better integrated
- WorldMaker 1y ago
  I've been using the Vertical tabs with Sideberry for a bit. The minified vertical tabs greatly declutters the top of the browser and feels pretty good, but I've got a lot of trees in Sideberry and several panels for organization structure that the built-in vertical tabs can't yet do, so for now most of my navigation is still Sideberry. Tab Groups are something to watch that may help some of what I use multiple panels for in Sideberry. I think native "tree-structure" is a lot more of what I'd particularly want, though.
iszomer 1y ago
Not a fan of vertical tabs as truncated titles hurts my fov aesthetics. These days I will just pin the tab when I want to go back to it later but even that has it's limits too.
- Zecc 1y ago
  After a certain number of open tabs, the titles are less truncated with vertical tabs than horizontal tabs. You also have more of the titles in your center view if you have the text distributed in a more rectangular shape than a technically-also-rectangular-but-much-more-elongated shape.
clumsysmurf 1y ago
I tried using vertical tabs and tab groups simultaneously, but there seems to be nothing like 'list all tabs' / Recent tab groups, so my tab groups are already lost amongst the other tabs. 'close duplicate tabs' is also missing from vertical tabs. Since I keep having to go into that menu I just disabled vertical tabs.
- wongogue 1y ago
  When you enable vertical tabs, the main toolbar gains a List All Tabs button at the very right.
  - clumsysmurf 1y ago
    Exactly, since the 'list all tabs' is a superset of vertical tab behavior, and I have to go there anyhow for things missing in vertical tabs, I disabled vertical tabs.
hardwaresofton 1y ago
I tried it! Didn’t stick yet but I’ll probably try it again, probably didn’t give it long enough to get used to it
microflash 1y ago
Been using vertical tabs to avoid floating toolbar gymnastics while sharing screen on Microsoft Teams. It’s been working great and now I don’t miss the horizontal tabs.
wickedsight 1y ago
I recently switched to Sidebery for this. Guess I'll have to do a comparison. I really enjoy Sidebery though, It has made my workflow at work much more organized.

I've been liking the new vertical tabs too.

by kryptn 1y ago

I've been liking the new vertical tabs too.

It's so much better than any of the extension-based XUL interface hacks. As soon as they can figure out when to auto-expand the sidebar it will be perfect.

throw10920 1y ago
Firefox moved away from XUL extensions years ago - they now use a well-defined WebExtension model that is kind of the opposite of hacky.
- wtallis 1y ago
  And yet, many of the extensions that in the XUL days could cleanly change the browser's UI now have a much more hacky user experience.
  - throw10920 1y ago
    Yes, because the APIs aren't perfectly fleshed-out. And they may never be, and yet that's still completely OK because the WebExtension model is obviously better along the performance, security, portability, and API stability axes.
    - wtallis 1y ago
      WebExtensions aren't clearly better from a performance standpoint. Performance won by removing useful features doesn't count.
      - throw10920 1y ago
        This is blatantly false, and one of the most dishonest and manipulative claims that I've seen on HN. Performance is performance. If one technology is more performant by removing features, useful or not, it it factually faster, and that performance absolutely does count. Features are completely irrelevant to performance measurements of a system. If you have two cars, car A with top speed 160 MPH and a 0-60 of 3s, and car be with top speech 120 MPH and a 0-60 of 5s, some people may still prefer car B because it has better mileage or nicer features or is cheaper (which is the overall value judgement that you seem to be extremely confused about), but precisely zero sane people will tell you that car A "isn't clearly better from a speed standpoint" because it has less features than car B.
        wtallis 1y ago
        Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. Aside from crippling ad blockers, are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions, or is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact?
        throw10920 1y ago
        > Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. OK, so now you're moving the goalposts, continuing to dishonestly redefine words, and cherry-picking specific instances of addons that support your point, while ignoring the fact that I soundly refuted your utterly insane previous argument. > Aside from crippling ad blockers No? WebExtensions clearly did not "cripple" ad blockers by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe you're conflating WebExtensions and Manifest v3? > Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite. Cherry-picking items to try to support your point only proves that you don't have robust evidence to support it in general. This is the hasty generalizations fallacy. As someone who lived through the WebExtensions transition, I didn't perceive any slowdown in any of my dozen or so extensions. > are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions Yes - if you had any knowledge at all of the old addon model, you'd know that the old XUL-based addons prevented Firefox's move to the multi-process Electrolysis architecture, which significantly improved performance. > is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact Yes, that is (on top of everything else) a performance benefit. Humans are not robots - all humans write bad and buggy code, and the XUL model not only made it much easier to write buggy and slow code, but the lack of a well-defined interface resulted in ossification that massively inhibited Mozilla's ability to develop Firefox.Even if it didn't, making changes that help/force the lower 99% of programmers to write better code while mildly inhibiting the ability of the top 1% of of programmers is absolutely worth it, and in practice has massively improved performance. If you tried to run old Firefox on a modern CPU with a bunch of extensions, you'd very clearly see the performance difference due to the ability to actually take full advantage of more than one core, and due to the improvements that Mozilla was able to make by deprecating the old API. Perhaps stop commenting unless you can stop committing numerous fallacies, making utterly insane statements, pretending that human factors don't exist, and making statements about things that you have no understanding of.
bool3max 1y ago
When’s the last time you used an extension of such kind? Sidebery for example doesn’t seem hacky at all to me.

snapplebobapple 1y ago

How does it compare to sidebery? I use the vertical tabs on that and quite like it but only found them because of another feature, per container socks5 (one for local ip and a few to strategically placed cheap vps to override my network default mullvad vpn tunneling as needed)

onli 1y ago
Sideberry is still better since it's hierarchical, so tabs are nested. But maybe the tab groups change that? Now or in a future iteration?
- Vinnl 1y ago
  Yeah vertical tabs with tab groups have replaced Sidebery's hierarchy and panels for me. Mostly because it feels slightly smoother and more performant as a built-in feature.
  - pantulis 1y ago
    Sidebery is awesome but afaik it doesn't seem that it syncs the state of your tabs across browsers. TabStash is not as visually polished but it achieves that capability by using Firefox bookmarks for the tabs and groups.
phito 1y ago
I like it better than sideberry/treestyletab, but I was not using the hierarchical feature of those two. It's just simpler and better integrated
WorldMaker 1y ago
I've been using the Vertical tabs with Sideberry for a bit. The minified vertical tabs greatly declutters the top of the browser and feels pretty good, but I've got a lot of trees in Sideberry and several panels for organization structure that the built-in vertical tabs can't yet do, so for now most of my navigation is still Sideberry. Tab Groups are something to watch that may help some of what I use multiple panels for in Sideberry. I think native "tree-structure" is a lot more of what I'd particularly want, though.

iszomer 1y ago

Not a fan of vertical tabs as truncated titles hurts my fov aesthetics. These days I will just pin the tab when I want to go back to it later but even that has it's limits too.

Zecc 1y ago
After a certain number of open tabs, the titles are less truncated with vertical tabs than horizontal tabs. You also have more of the titles in your center view if you have the text distributed in a more rectangular shape than a technically-also-rectangular-but-much-more-elongated shape.

clumsysmurf 1y ago

I tried using vertical tabs and tab groups simultaneously, but there seems to be nothing like 'list all tabs' / Recent tab groups, so my tab groups are already lost amongst the other tabs. 'close duplicate tabs' is also missing from vertical tabs. Since I keep having to go into that menu I just disabled vertical tabs.

wongogue 1y ago
When you enable vertical tabs, the main toolbar gains a List All Tabs button at the very right.
- clumsysmurf 1y ago
  Exactly, since the 'list all tabs' is a superset of vertical tab behavior, and I have to go there anyhow for things missing in vertical tabs, I disabled vertical tabs.

hardwaresofton 1y ago

I tried it! Didn’t stick yet but I’ll probably try it again, probably didn’t give it long enough to get used to it

microflash 1y ago

Been using vertical tabs to avoid floating toolbar gymnastics while sharing screen on Microsoft Teams. It’s been working great and now I don’t miss the horizontal tabs.

wickedsight 1y ago

I recently switched to Sidebery for this. Guess I'll have to do a comparison. I really enjoy Sidebery though, It has made my workflow at work much more organized.