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.

[Lasercat]

If I make a video full screen, the vertical tabs resize to be just icons when I exit the video.

[Grapes]

Excellent work! I am preparing to switch from Arc (MacOS) and Edge (Windows) to Firefox.

I am a heavy sidebar user, and while Firefox now meets my basic needs, it is still inconvenient in some aspects.

In Arc, I can easily pin tabs and create folders to manage these frequently used tabs. I usually pin documents and pages that I use frequently for work. Currently, I use Firefox's bookmarks bar to replace this feature, but it is not as convenient.

Additionally, I hope there is a shortcut to quickly expand and collapse the sidebar, as I usually focus on one document at a time during work.

In Edge, a feature I like (though it's not crucial for me) is having sidebars on both the left and right sides. I pin frequently used apps, like Gmail and ChatGPT, in the right sidebar.

[vuong]

When I hover on sidebar button on top bar, it shown me ^Z (control+Z) could help to to Expand/Hide, but I tried and it didn't work.

[Pfize183]

On hover I got CTRL + ALT + Z and it works.

[vuong]

Thanks, I guess you're using Windows.

I've tried with Ctrl+Option+Z (MacOS) but still doesn't work.

[PatriceGr]

CTRL + ALT + Z doesn't work on my Nightly…

I prefer definitely Vertical Tabs (the module) or Tree Tabs that use F1 to switch. And I can change the shortcut if I want.