Firefox Sidebar and Vertical tabs: try them out in Nightly Firefox Labs 131

[asafko]

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:

• This work is still very much in progress and has some rough edges, functionally and visually. You’ll see us improve and polish things over the coming months.
• We will be sharing our informal backlog of improvements in this post today, so you can get a sense for where we ultimately want these features to be.
• To design this first version, we conducted extensive research, talked to many Firefox users to understand their multitasking and context-switching needs, and prototyped extensively to find the best solutions to address them.

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.

[ecky-l]

Great Feature! I am using it on FF Nightly, which I installed solely to use the vertical tabs. In addition to the other comments above, I'd like to make two suggestions:

• be able to (optionally) disable the preview when hovering over the tabs in the vertical tab bar (currently the preview is always shown, which distracts focus)
• set the minimum width of the vertical tab bar to just as wide, that a close button can be displayed for each tab icon. Then display the close button when hovering over a tab, so that the user can close a tab straight away with one click (I know you can use <Super>-w, but most users do likely prefer the visual way)

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

---

@ecky-l wrote:

• be able to (optionally) disable the preview when hovering over the tabs

---

Try

Configuration Editor for Firefox https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
Search browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled and set to false
Restart Firefox

To restore Firefox setting, Show an image preview when you hover on a tab, in about:preferences#general

Configuration Editor for Firefox
Search browser.tabs.hoverPreview.enabled and set to true
Restart Firefox

[YPAP2205]

Will it be possible to remove extensions that are on the sidebar? A couple extensions I have are on the sidebar, and I can't have them removed. There can be users who wouldn't want their extensions to be on the sidebar. But other than that everything is good, I like the improved sidebar and the new vertical tabs.

*Edited to fix grammar mistakes

[Pfize]

When can we expect an update with improvements to the sidebar and vertical tabs based on our suggestion?

[tilwiti]

@asafko 🙏

[Encrypter]

I just had a chance to try it out, and it looks fantastic! In addition to the great points @blu mentioned, I think it might be helpful to add a close button on the sidebar tab when hovering over it. Currently, hovering over the tab doesn’t trigger any action.

[Jonathing]

Good stuff. Firefox has been in desperate need of native vertical tabs for a while now, especially since all other Firefox-derived browsers suffer as a result from attempting their own implementation non-natively.

A few things I'd like to see in future Nightly releases:

• Removal of the title/window label bar. Right now the only things on it are the new tab button (removable, thankfully), the tab overflow button, and the standard close, maximize, and minimize buttons. These can all easily be condensed into the same space as the address bar.
• The UI elements on the vertical tabs bar does not seem to be aligned very well. It's especially noticeable when the active tab in the collapsed tabs bar looks like it's about to clip off the right side of it (image attached)
• Auto-expanding and collapsing on mouse hover.

Obviously I don't want to name drop here, but my best experience comes from a certain nondescript Chromium-based browser on a popular operating system 😅

[haingdc]

With a lots of tabs in the current session, I like a tweak configuration in tabbar, click on tab A to switch to the previous tab.

Currently, we have several options:

- First, click on Firefox View button, on the Open tabs panel, The tabs are shown sort by time. Choose the top newly opening tabs

- In the Settings - General section, enable the options labeled "Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order"

They are good choices. However, flip previous tab can be an quicker option. Even we can have a shortcut for it

#referance to

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tab-flip-for-tree-style-tab

[warner_mark]

Interesting! I'm a bit hesitant to switch from the standard layout, but the sidebar for extensions and bookmarks sounds useful. Might give Nightly a spin this weekend to see how it feels.

[GJ]

Thank you for the recent feature update! I appreciate the new functionality. I would like to suggest a couple of enhancements to improve the user experience with vertical tabs:

1. Auto-hide Side Bar: It would be great if the sidebar could auto-hide and then auto-display when the cursor moves into that area. This would help in maximizing screen space.

2. Optimize Search Bar Space: There’s some extra space above the search bar that could be better utilized. Perhaps the buttons in that area could be moved adjacent to the search bar, freeing up more screen space.

[Agentvirtuel]

Hello

1. of course, this is not the expected answer
Nevertheless, https://www.userchrome.org
If you'd like to try, userChrome.css
https://github.com/MrOtherGuy/firefox-csshacks/blob/master/chrome/autohide_sidebar.css

Clarification, into userChrome.css, --uc-sidebar-width: 40px, i set --uc-sidebar-width: 1px

--uc-sidebar-width: 1px;

https://www.youtube.com/embed/b7gdgNT9HkA

[fuseteam]

i wholly agree with #1

#2 is apparently already in the works 😄

[Erwan]

30/08/24
First test for me.
It looks promising, but there's still a lot of customization work to be done:
- only 2 choices: large or small tab, but I'd like an intermediate-sized tab, not too large so as not to reduce the window too much, but big enough to have the little cross to close quickly.
- strongly related, if I set my slidebars to wide, it should stay that way and not shrink at the first opportunity.
- History, Bookmarks should be tabs at the top of the sidebars and replace the sidebars when you click on them, instead of being a new window that's far too intrusive in our window.

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

[Kenkrik]

Thank you for this amazing update.
Now something I would love to see added would be the ability to add a second bookmarks toolbar to the sidebar so that you could click on favicons and bookmarks folders directly.
Another great feature would the the possibility to permanently pin apps to the sidebar even if you are using horizontal tabs (and it would also be nice to have the ability to share the pinned apps between all windows so that you could treat the sidebar as a quick access menu for your most important tabs).
Again, thank you so much for your hard work.

[piradata]

there is a little bug if the sidebar is on the right, its impossible to resize the panel horizontally. if it is on the left, it can be resized normally

[JoeySav]

Is there anyway we can get an auto hide and auto extend feature, like when you hover your mouse on the sidebar it will stretch out (as a toggle of course 🙂 ) If this is something that is already in the works, disregard this message , i am an imbecile

[PedroSaldanha]

I'm not liking this, to be honest. The purpose of vertical tabs is often to free up horizontal space, given modern widescreen displays. However, what is happening in the implementation of Firefox—though it's not just Firefox—is that extra space is being used. The top bar still takes up a considerable amount of space and occupies lateral space as well. In the end, the number of occupied pixels on the screen is greater.

The experience I want to see in Firefox with vertical tabs is one that uses little or no space in the top bar, maximizing information and tools that should be on the side control, as if the entire browser were lying down. Nothing above.

[fuseteam]

the top bar is going to be slimmed down, this is confirmed in a post further up the thread. this is part of the reason the implemention is still experimental 😉

[wutongtaiwan]

I want to adjust the order of the sidebar tools by dragging the sidebar tools with the mouse, and I recommend adding this feature. Also, I think the sidebar is a bit wide and takes up too much space

[Pfize183]

Today I received Nightly 132, but no (visible) changes based on our suggestions 😞

https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/132.0a1/releasenotes/ 

[tilwiti]

@asafko😶‍🌫️

[firefly_katamar]

I'm going to echo people's complaint / concerns with the current implementation of vertical tabs in FF. 

What I'd love to see in macOS is how I have my brave browser set-up, taking up as little vertical space as possible. 

 

[fuseteam]

if this is about the navbar collapsing— it has been confirmed it is being worked on in an post further up

[amc]

Until now I have been using the Tab Stash extension for vertical tabs. Comparing that with the current implementation in Nightly, I still prefer using Tab Stash, with the old sidebar.

Even ignoring the "stash" feature, the extension is better for vertical tabs because I can keep horizontal tabs displayed; I tend to use both. Its vertical tabs are also displayed more compactly.

For the sidebar, the separate toolbar feels wasteful. The best option might be to put the view icons at the top, where the old sidebar has its dropdown list.

[aleks2137]

Please, I need vertical tabs. It's the only reason I am not switching back to Firefox.

[YPAP2205]

Vertical tabs can be used in firefox version 130, I'm using it and it works pretty well. You can enable it in about:config by adding/setting "sidebar.revamp" set to true as it won't work without it. Then either set "sidebar.verticaltabs" to true or on the sidebar click on "Customize sidebar" and enable vertical tabs.

[Leogeorge2]

Firefox Nightly 131 introduces vertical tabs and a new sidebar for improved multitasking. Users can activate these features in Firefox Labs, though the sidebar icon must be manually added to the toolbar for now. This is an ongoing development, and feedback is encouraged to help refine these features over time.

[YPAP2205]

I think someone already mentioned this already, but I think when the sidebar is set to be hidden. Then the user can hover their mouse around the sidebar area, and the sidebar would appear. Because right now in the nightly channel v132, the sidebar isn't hidden when it's set to "Always hide". Which takes up an inconvenient amount of screen space. Microsoft Edge has this, and it helps save screen space.

Edit: Ok, looks like someone has already mentioned it.

[unengaged]

Let me say I love to be finally able to switch from Edge to Firefox thanks to the sidebars in Firefox nightly!

That being said, there is stuff to improve (basically look at how Edge does is), one probably minor but huge quality of live improvement that comes right to my mind and saves a lot of time:

When opening a new tab, the scrolling position of the sidebar stays where it was - so if I quickly open something and want to close it, I have to scroll down to the very end. It would be quite convenient, if opening a new tab makes the sidebar scroll down automatically.

Or, since some people probably like to stay where they are, just open a new tab the way the "open link in new tab"-feature works: Just next to the active tab.

Thanks alot!

[siny]

PLEASE create native multi-row tabs, this is one thing missing from Firefox since forever

[yoasif]

Try paxmod.

[siny]

The screenshot is with paxmod, but it stopped working after some changes in Firefox Nightly on 2024-08-22, and a few days later also in Dev.

Now, I think that I would actually like sidebar tabs, but with some tweaks:

- pinned tabs should take as much vertical space as needed to show them all, but be more compact, even more than in my screenshot

- other tabs should appear in columns with user defined maximum tab width, with MUCH less white space, everything should be more compact. Sidebar also needs to be resizable, with tabs growing proportionally until they reach min/max width, at which moment they should be re-aranged in fewer/more columns.

The point is: I want to see ALL 75, 100, or more tabs at once (yes, I have two 28" 4K monitors at 125% zoom), without any scrolling or waiting for popups to see what is behind the icon.

[mattheja]

Sorry if I am repeating something already said, but reading through all the replies and open bugs is too much time.

This is an excellent starting point. Kudos to the team!

Feedback:

- Allow me to re-size the sidebar. It's too wide by default. The collapsed sidebar only showing the icons is too sparse.

- A hierarchical tree navigation of tabs in the sidebar would be valuable show/hide associated tabs.

- I'd like to be able to create a folder or group for tabs, then show only those tabs. The folder/group selector would be somewhere in the sidebar. This is a feature offered by the Sideberry extension called "Group tabs (aka folders) with a custom name helps organize open pages."

[D0m1n1c]

Totally agree with the second suggestion, it's the same thing as some extensions offer (Tree Style Tab for exemple).

For the suggestion 3, maybe the team could bring to desktop the Collections that we have in the mobile browser.

[24Seven]

Hallelujah! Vertical tabs. Only took a couple of decades. I like that can now disable extensions that were doing that same. As for desired features:

1. Resizeable sidebar
2. Ability to control sorting
3. Smaller/configurable font/spacing to get see more tabs per screen.
4. Smaller icons for pinned tabs

[oDaniel]

I'm a fan of the new sidebar; I think it is really nice. I never really used many of these features before, but I use some workspaces on Obsidian and I am accustomed to having two tabs open at the same time for my workflow there.

I don't know if you can already do this or if there's a reason why you can't, but adding tabs to the sidebar would be nice. And I don't mean the vertical tabs. I mean being able to open a website or something in the sidebar, as you would open your history.

Having the ability to view two tabs in the same window would be convenient. I know you can do this by having two windows open, but maybe this feature could be implemented in this way.

[achede22]

As someone who has been using vertical tabs and recently transitioned from the Edge browser, I’ve found that placing the "new tab" button at the bottom of the vertical tabs column aligns better with my workflow. It allows me to quickly add new tabs when I’m at the end of my tab list, rather than having to reach for the top of the column.

I would like to request an option to move the "new tab" (plus sign) button to the lower end of the vertical tabs column. Alternatively, providing users with the ability to choose the button’s placement would be highly beneficial, allowing everyone to customize their experience based on personal preference.

Thank you for considering this suggestion. I believe it could enhance the user experience for those who prefer or are accustomed to a similar layout from other browsers.

[Vulcan__]

The new slimmed down title bar is not looking good. A better option would be to fuse the address bar and navigation bar when vertical tabs are enabled (similar to every other browser that supports vertical tabs)

[Cocomonk]

Firstly, thank you very much for the addition of the sidebar and vertical tabs.  I moved right over to Nightly specifically for them, and have really been enjoying their use.

I have seen a new bug that must have been introduced sometime in the last 1-2 updates.  If I enable the sidebar now, when I enter a partial URL or search term into the address bar, the search results dropdown now appears *behind* the background of the tab, rather than on top of it like normal.  This only occurs in a freshly opened tab, not ones that already have a web page in it.  I didn't see in anywhere in the comments list, so wanted to make it known

[Cocomonk]

After the patch last night, that bug appears to be fixed.  Thank you!