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.

[Fenris]

After the close button was added to the minimised vertical tabs I have several times accidentally closed a tab instead of switching to it.

I think it would be better if the close button was on the right side of the tab icon instead of on the left so the risk of unintentionally hitting the button is lowered.

Alternatively an about:config setting that could be used to either move it or disable the button completely (for those of us who use ctrl-w or middle mouse button to close tabs already).

[JoeySav]

Thank you guys for finally adding the expand sidebar on hover , so much better .

[Aerian]

Can you keep the bottom group of buttons vertical? I hate having to double-check which icon to click. Also, when the sidebar is on the right, the close button should be on the left, otherwise it's easy to click it accidentally.

[PatriceGr]

Right, the tabs are displayed on hovering over the side panel where the tab groups are displayed. But it's not fluid, and there's a mismatch between the folded tabs as icons, and the unfolded position. In comparison, Microsoft Edge handles this feature much better.

I sincerely hope it improves. Good luck guys.

[PatriceGr]

The mismatch between the folded tabs as icons, and the deployed position I mentioned above. I've superimposed two screen captions to illustrate the problem. You can focus on it visually, and it's very detrimental to the final look of the functionality.

I sincerely hope it improves.