07-24-2024 01:14 PM - edited 08-08-2024 07:55 AM
Hi folks,
Vertical tabs and a new sidebar experience that make multitasking and context-switching easier are now available in Nightly 131. To try them, update to the latest Nightly and go to Settings > Firefox Labs, and activate the Sidebar and Vertical tabs experiments.
After you do this, you will be able to see the new sidebar, but you will still need to add the sidebar icon to the toolbar to be able to expand vertical tabs. Click Customize toolbar in the toolbar right-click menu, and drag the sidebar icon to your toolbar. This is a temporary situation, and in the future the icon will be added to the toolbar automatically.
A few things to keep in mind:
What we’re putting out there is something that we believe will help the majority of people using Firefox achieve their day-to-day tasks. We know there is no perfect solution for everyone and welcome your feedback to shape the direction we move forward in.
08-08-2024 09:51 AM - edited 08-08-2024 10:00 AM
Just another opinion on tree tabs, which I disagree being made native:
2. Tree tabs aren't strictly necessary, one could just organize things ( tabs and their possible combination sets ) with features like Arc's folders ( for tab grouping of tabs into meaningful tasks ) and spaces ( for tasks of a particular kind/nature/theme ). Which are similar features to that of Vivaldi with its collapsible stacks and workspaces. Its stacks can group links opened from a parent page or its children into the same tab stack automatically and/or manually with its stack tabs by host or by selection, for example, if those options are enabled in Vivaldi's settings.
Disclaimer: I'm not a nightly build user, so I haven't a full view of what's being referred to, particularly images of still in development features.
08-08-2024 09:37 AM
Im very happy with this change and think it looks really nice, specially with the default skin on linux. Very clean and elegant. It has some bugs still but its nightly, so it will get sorted out.
08-08-2024 10:28 AM
I like it! my main ask that hasn't been addressed yet is: I'd like a keyboard shortcut to toggle expand/collapse sidebar.
I figured out how to do that via the "show sidebars" button, but if there's a keyboard shortcut I don't know about it
08-08-2024 10:35 AM
The new history sidebar is worse in nearly every way compared to the old one.
Issues:
09-23-2024 03:17 PM - edited 09-23-2024 03:23 PM
I'd like to thank Mozilla for this initiative, I've been trying for a long time to eliminate tabs from my field of vision when I'm concentrating.
However, I agree with yoasif: I have a lot of trouble with the new design of the history sidebar,
I still much prefer the classic version:
I find it far too imposing (more suited to mobile than PC), not ergonomic for me and we lose legibility; less character possible too. And what could be a bit more interesting is being able to fold or unfold “child” tabs around a “parent” tab. If I could go back to the classic version (image 2), I'd be grateful.
10-03-2024 09:25 AM
I prefer the new design for its UI, more modern. But I agree there is a lot of spacing that is not ergonomic. Could be a mix of both, new design, elements collapsed by default with less padding inside each of them.
08-08-2024 10:56 AM - edited 08-08-2024 10:59 AM
I love the implementation so far as a proof of concept. Would like to 2nd strxpdew's suggestion of having different shelves for containers. Maybe also an option to auto-hide/reveal the sidebars on mouseover? Also maybe a right-click option on New Tab to select which container the tab should be for
08-08-2024 11:06 AM
Individual Panel width sizing like Vivaldi. Ability to add web pages to the panel. Setting to expand sidepanel and vertical tabs on hover.
08-16-2024 05:18 PM
Agreed, adding expandable side panel like has been integrated in to Firefox forks like Floorp and Zen would be amazing.
08-08-2024 11:13 AM
A couple of things:
1. One is obviously tabs nesting, and able to resize the sidebar.
2. The blue line marker to know the current active tab is not all intuitive. The highlight can be on the whole tab.
3. The tooltip and tab-preview are one the sidebar which is can be on the right side of the sidebar.
08-15-2024 12:23 PM
I agree with point 3. I would like to see the tab preview on the side of the sidebar, not under the tab itself.
08-08-2024 11:27 AM
It's great. Things I'd like to see improved:
08-08-2024 11:57 AM
I really like what I see! Thank you for the great implementation.
Here is what I would like to see:
1. Option to hide the titlebar
2. auto-expand and auto-collapse of the sidebar with the vertical tabs
08-08-2024 12:00 PM
Hi there!
Thank you so much for this feature, its fantastic and I really like the innovative idea to link extensions and chatbots into the tab bar, great stuff!!
One feature I notice I miss moving from a javascript/css extension Tab Center Reborn is the ability to widen the tab bar temporarily on hover. This helps me keep track of the tabs with text like I usually can on horizontal tabs. I have (hopefully) attached a video.
Thanks again!!
08-08-2024 12:17 PM
1. It would be nice if a new private window did not default to having the sidebar tabs collapsed. When I open a private window, I expect the sidebar tabs to be expanded if my regular browser window has them expanded.
2. Is there a hotkey for expanding/collapsing vertical tabs?
08-13-2024 01:06 PM
I agree with the point 1 !
08-08-2024 12:20 PM
Thanks really enjoying it so far!
08-08-2024 06:44 PM
It is possible to move to tabs that are not visible in the tab strip using the keyboard - unlike the horizontal implementation, the "tabs" remain offscreen.
In the screencast above, I have moved from tabs visible on the strip to those that are not, and back to tabs that are visible.
08-08-2024 06:45 PM
Hi there, great to see this out in the wild! Long-time user of tree-style tabs (and Firefox) that's been looking forward to a native implementation. For context, I tend to have 10-50 tabs open in each window, often leaning on the windows themselves for master grouping.
I'm not a TST / vertical tabs power user, but the two main features I rely on day-to-day are:
In addition to those built-in features, I've also built a very simple TST hack / extension that - IMO - provides a bit more of a holistic approach to tab organisation. Instead of using vertical OR horizontal tabs, it uses both: reserving the horizontal tab space as a "workspace" for recently active and pinned tabs and then including the full laundry list in the sidebar. It's not perfect, but combined with tab grouping and unloading I've found it to be a pretty solid / flexible approach to prioritising your current area of browsing focus. I've been using it as a daily driver for a number of years. In brief:
To be clear, this is just one angle at solving a general tab organisation challenge. I'd be equally interested in an alternative approach that tackles the same. See below for an old screen grab:
Some additional features I'd love to see:
Thanks again for all the hard work. Cheers!
08-08-2024 09:02 PM
Hi, When use vertical sidebar. I notice the width is narrow with some tools. We have drag to adjust the width. It would be nice to have assignable shortcuts for increasing/decreasing sidebar width as it will be faster anytime
08-08-2024 11:21 PM
Hello!
Thank you for landing this long-awaited feature!
For me the main reason for wanting the vertical side-bar is because of the stupid aspect ratio of most modern displays, wasting a lot of horizontal space.
So horizontal space I have, and I don't need the vertical bar to be this compact, and having a list of icons for me is just not usable, I can find my tabs, I need to be able to see the labels/page titles. So for now I think I won't be using it, but when that's solved, I'll be all over it!
Thanks again.
Kind regards,
François
08-08-2024 11:25 PM
Finally! Thx! I like the first approach and the feeling, and I hope you will be implementing one of the big avantages to use vertical tabs: tab grouping / tree style tabs.
08-09-2024 01:09 AM
The sidebar's AI chatbot isn't working for me. 😥
08-09-2024 02:02 AM
Great start! A few notes specifically about using this on a touch device:
Overall, a very good start, well integrated and functional. I'm defaulting to it on Nightly for now for my touch devices.
08-09-2024 02:31 AM
When vertical tabs are in use, the titlebar is largely empty, containing only three redundant tab navigation buttons.
It would be preferable if the titlebar could be hidden entirely in this mode, saving some vertical space.
08-09-2024 03:54 AM
"Close multiple tabs" => "Close tabs to left" makes no sense in vertical layout. Should read "Close tabs above".
Same goes for the opposite direction: "Close tabs to right" shoud now say "Close tabs below".
08-09-2024 05:01 AM
I mainly have three issues with the new sidebar (testing on 129 instead of nightly, sorry, lmk if any of this has been adressedalready)
08-09-2024 06:01 AM
The toolbar "Show sidebars" button now seems to work on the vertical tab strip instead of the sidebar like it used to previously. You can see this easily by installing Open in Sidebar, opening something in the sidebar, then clicking the "Show sidebars" button in the toolbar with the new sidebar enabled.
In release, the button shows and hides the extension sidebar. In Nightly, it acts on the tab strip.
This seems broken to me.
08-09-2024 06:12 AM
Long-pressing the vertical new tab button doesn't offer me a way to open a new container tab.
08-09-2024 08:46 AM
I think the vertical tabs look great, I was using the Tree Style Tabs extension previously, and I miss the following features:
- Being able to nest tabs and collapse them from a common parent tab
- Having a hotkey / shortcut to collapse or expand the whole sidebar (the same behavior that you get when pressing the "Show sidebar" button). I don't think this currently exists, or if it does I don't know where to find it.
Great job by the way! I was waiting for this for a long time.
08-09-2024 08:56 PM
This is nice but it still has a few bugs to iron out. One feature I would like to see is tab labels to the left/right of the vertical tabs as icons sometimes are not enough to distinguish at a glance what the tab is.
Also on a default toolbar with no customizations, the "Open a new tab (Ctrl+T)" button and "View recent browsing across windows" button stays on the horizontal tab list when you turn on vertical tabs, which makes the horizontal tab list look empty, it would be nice if they were moved to the vertical tab bar.
But still, this is a great start!
08-09-2024 09:42 PM
This is fantastic! My only request would be to add tree-style visualization like with this extension - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/
08-09-2024 10:57 PM
Hi, it'd be nice if the Vertical tabs are kept seperate from the sidebar, similar to how its done in MSEdge.
Heres a similar implementation in firefox with sideberry and the bookmarks bar moved to the right to create a makeshift sidebar using custom CSS.
Heres how something similar looks im MSEdge
Cheers
08-10-2024 03:35 AM
Thank you for bringing this long awaited feature to Firefox - it feels great to finally have my tabs on the left!
Albeit the feature is great, switching tabs using ⌘ + ⌥ + <left-arrow> and ⌘ + ⌥ + <right-arrow> in vertical mode does not feel logical to me. It would be great if it could be swapped to use <up-arrow> and <down-arrow> instead.
08-10-2024 04:50 AM - edited 08-10-2024 05:00 AM
So happy to see this–finally!
Initial feedback:
Thanks for the work on this!
08-10-2024 06:47 AM
Hi
Thanks for your hard working ,
I use brave currently because vertical tabs in this browser is simple and useful enough for me, feature like (all in vertical tabs) :
1- tab grouping
2- group sync between devices with sync account
3- resizable panle size
4- custom keyboard shortcut for create new tab(next to current tab or after last child , ...
08-10-2024 07:43 AM
Thanks for mentioning the issues that are still being worked on, because the gaps on top took me by surprise until I read that this part was still work-in-progress.
I'm watching with interest whether this work can replace my own custom adaptations of Firefox:
08-10-2024 08:35 AM
Hi, thank you for adding this feature to the "vanilla" nightly 🙂
Two minor UI suggestions re. vertical tabs bar:
- I'd like to see the "new tab" icon on the bottom of all current open tabs. This way I won't have a "gap" between my current open tabs, and my current pinned tabs.
- I'd also like to see a minor "x" to close a tab when I hover my mouse pointer on it, so I can close it quickly when I no longer need it (and make it more accessible to those who don't have a middle mouse button / not tech savvy persons).
One major nice to have would be to squeeze the whole adressbar into the title bar, i.e. same top-row that has minimize, maximize and close buttons. I understand that it would be a headache though, considering each desktop would require a different implementation for it.
Keep up the awesome work 🔥
/K
08-14-2024 10:19 PM
Hello
@KRASH wrote:I'd also like to see a minor "x" to close a tab when I hover my mouse pointer on it
Unless i've misunderstood
For information purposes https://www.userchrome.org
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/improvements-to-the-firefox-sidebar-are-on-the-way/m-p/61...
userChrome.css and by way of illustration
.tab-close-button:hover{background-color:red !important;}
https://www.youtube.com/embed/y9j3Z1-X0GE
Other https://www.w3schools.com/colors/default.asp
Restart Firefox if you modify the code
08-10-2024 08:40 AM
This is a useful feature which I have been hoping to see in Firefox. I would suggest making the sidebar resizeable when it opens up, so you can see the entire label of each sidebar tab.
To give you some insight into my use case and why that would be useful to people like me:
I often have a large number of tabs to remote desktop sessions open for my job, where the title of each tab starts with a (relatively long) username, followed by the server name, which is the part of the title I would like to see. Of course, the tabs can only be so long in horizontal tabs, so the server names are not visible in the tab labels without hovering over them. Vertical tabs more or less solve this problem for me by allowing more of the tab label to be shown, and so revealing the full name of the server and allowing me to quickly jump between them without hovering on each tab to check which RDP connection each tab leads to.
However, despite the fact that these new vertical tabs now show more of the server names, some of it is still cut off -- and I can't seem to resize the sidebar to an appropriate length to show the whole length of the tab labels.
I am very happy that this feature has been added, in any case!