Sidebar and Vertical Tabs Launch in Release 136

[asafko]

Hi folks! The updated sidebar and vertical tabs are now rolled out and available to all release users on Firefox 136.

How to enable it
Go to Firefox Settings → General → Browser Layout and check Show sidebar. Then, choose the settings icon in the sidebar to customize which tools appear. You can turn on vertical tabs from sidebar settings or simply right-click on the Firefox toolbar or tab strip and select Turn on Vertical Tabs.

Firefox Settings: Browser layout

Customize sidebar options

Key improvements

✅ Horizontal tab users can now hide and show the sidebar with one click using the sidebar toolbar button.

✅ Sidebar settings have been streamlined, making customization easier.

✅ Close vertical tabs in one click without expanding them. The close button now appears when hovering over a tab favicon.

✅ We’ve removed auto-collapse behavior of vertical tabs, as it proved cumbersome for many folks. 

What’s next? 

We’re working on more improvements to enhance the sidebar and vertical tabs experience. Some top priorities include:

• Remembering your last opened sidebar panel. When you hide the sidebar and then reopen it, the last opened panel will already be expanded. We hope to ship this as soon as Firefox 137 (April 1).
• More sorting options for history and better keyboard navigation, to match the functionality of the previous sidebar version.
• Expanding vertical tabs on hover for easier navigation.

As usual, we appreciate your patience and continued use as we refine these features and experiment to help us get to a better, more polished experience. 

[milen_prg]

Please, tell me:

1. Who will exchange the 15 pixels themed beautiful line from the top of the screen, showing informative title, with ugly 1/5 of the whole screen from left (or right)?!

2. Who will use this vertical wide bar, which not hides when not used, with awful light blue color, the text on it is white, so absolutely unreadable, ugly, etc.

???

[achoo42]

Well, I like the vertical tabs because the screen has more width than height, so it can be a better use of space. I will often have way too many tabs open when I'm researching something and it's so much easier to see them all and make a selection when they're vertical. I can see more tab titles at once, and use my scroll wheel to navigate the list. And I don't mind the browser window being a little narrower because, again, scrolling is so easy.

[dh7]

In collapsed mode the audio icon takes up too much of the space and you end up accidentally clicking on it rather than the tab itself

[NO_CARRIER]

I love that they've seen the light with vertical tabs (I've been using TreeStyleTab) but the feature seems broken for me. I get an empty sidebar with the built-in buttons (AI chat, History, etc.) but no tabs at all. The row containing the navigation buttons, address bar, extension icons, etc. get shoved up into the title bar and get cut off (because the nav bar is taller than the title bar). The menu is no longer usable and ironically I can't access any tabs except the current one unless I re-enable TreeStyleTab. I thought maybe it could be because I have too many tabs open, but I get the same result in a Private Window with only a single tab open. Completely disabling the TreeStyleTab extension doesn't help.

[WyldDandelyon]

The sidebar is a great idea--lots of web pages have so much space to the sides of the content, it sounded perfect. But while the horizontal sidebar has that little down-arrow-thingy to let you list all tabs, the vertical one does not!  I went back to the horizontal one when I realized I could only see three non-pinned tabs and had no way to get the list of the rest of them to appear.  Please fix this!!!!!

[dimas_sc]

I'd love to use the new feature, but I can't live without nesting tabs / tree structure

[Jiu]

There is a mysterious empty space on toolbar which can't be removed when I enable it. Most I can do is to move it the right side of address bar. This space is not present when I revert back to Horizontal tab.

[popop14302]

I know it might just be growing pains, but it takes me like 5-10 seconds every time to remember that I close tabs at the sides now, not at the top. I'd very much appreciate it if the address bar has a "close tab" button at the right of it, there's such a large space between the address bar and the "Save to Pocket" button, that a Close Tab button to the right of the address bar is a perfect place.

Also agree with others that too easy to accidentally close a tab now.

[ady]

I like the new sidebar but there is one option it's missing for me: please enable the rearangement of the tabs from top to bottom or bottom to top. Now the newest tab is always at the bottom and it feels very unintuitive. IMO the newest tab should always be on the top and the older ones at the bottom. Would be nice if there was an option to change this!

[achoo42]

I could see this being a nice option, good idea!

[imcraymond]

Version 138.0b2.

Please add "scroll to active tab". Lack of scrolling makes closing the current tab rather difficult.

EDIT: Turns out it scrolls to new tab, but if you expand/collapse the tabs it goes back to the top...

Drag and drop automatically created a new group. Could this be optional or a "do you want to" popup?

[xx2]

Extremely embarrassing to see an AI feature. I fully disabled it from configs, and if you continue down this path, I will be looking for a new browser,

[turninto]

Agreed. There's no world in which these bots are actually helpful. All they do is regurgitate and hallucinate.

[achoo42]

I simply didn't enable the feature, like so many other options I choose not to use. Is that not enough?

[davidgl]

Awesome, thanks for this.  As a UX researcher & designer I would say it is necessary when displaying the bookmarks panel on the right AS WELL as the vertical tabs/sidebar that the bookmarks are on the left of the sidebar.
Conceptually , bookmarks are a more permanent/ universal resource than tabs which are (in theory) more temporal, so moving from left to right you have the permanent resource, the more temporary resource, and the active view.

Also, you open tabs from bookmarks, so you could think of it as : Permanent resource on left, apply to temporal resource on right-the tab is the heading for what you are looking at so it should be adjacent to the current view. 

[GM_CRC]

I love the sidebar, but I found a little bug. Set the new sidebar to the right, opened ChatGPT to ask a about a technical issue, ChatGPT responded and added a YouTube video inside the sidebar, I clicked in the "Playing Picture in Picture" button, then the little PiP window opens but no video on it and close button didn't respond, had to end Firefox from task manager in order to close the PiP Window that got stock on screen.

[codesmithx]

I totally love this! Excellent idea. Hopefully you can add an option to put it on right vertical side of the screen. When launcher is on left side such as on Mac OS or Ubuntu, a confusion arises when hovering.

[sky04]

Using the new sidebar limits us to having a very, very small area of the app window that we can use to actually move the window around, which is extremely inconvenient, especially for those of us with multiple screens that move stuff around. Right now I can only grab on to the tiny area between the back and forward arrows and the refresh button, and that just isn't enough. This kills the feature for me completely.

[codesmithx]

Your screen might be very small. It's perfect here.

[Gnomasz]

This is very nice! Thank you for the feature!

The one thing i don't like is that turning on vertical tabs changes how the sidebar is themed - using the names from Firefox Color, it changes from Toolbar Color to Background Color. This feels jarring and overwhelming with my theme, which uses the Windows accent color for the window decoration. I'd much rather the vertical tabs used the toolbar color palette.

 On the plus side I want to add that I found it easy and intuitive to find the settings and customise the sidebar (but my "computer literacy" is rather high).

[IsaDesOsiers]

I want to turn off AI. I see several comments here from other Mozilla members asking how to do this. The way AI is being developed and foisted down everyone's throat is more than merely "problematic". It is scary and dangerous. The actual developers of AI have been warning that AI is dangerous. We have opened Pandora's Box at a time of such political instability, with the rise of various Totalitarian, Authoritarian, Oligarchic tendencies gaining power all over the world. AI will be a terrible weapon in the hands of these groups, no? I don't want it on my beautiful Firefox Browser. I should be able to choose.

[ReK_]

I'm really enjoying this new feature so far, however there are couple improvements that would significantly improve the experience:

• Add a loading indicator/animation to the URL bar in addition to the one on the sidebar tab.
• Add the ability to hide extensions, either individual or all, from the sidebar.
• Add the ability to hide the "Customize sidebar" button.
• Add a search box at the top (when expanded) that will live filter tabs based on title, and a keyboard shortcut to move focus to that box similar to Ctrl+L.

[lucifer25x]

It'd be great if we had the option to choose if opening something like AI chatbot from the sidebar would change the width of the website or would be like a popup.

I saw something about tab groups in news about Firefox, I think, but couldn't create one in vertical tab mode (I haven't tried it in horizontal tab mode)

[JLB5488]

How about the ability to pin certain tabs that are used regularly to the vertical sidebar and allow horizontal tabs for less used sites but actively working on them?

[_wojtek]

OMG! I love vertical tabs. Previously tried to use TreeStyleTab but it took quite a lot of space in the end (so I used multiple windows as a "grouping" mechanism instead) but having collapsed sidebar with only icons is brilliant! I still use multiple windows but icons, most of the time, are more than enough to get to the desired website.

There is an issue with dragging-them out if the sidebar is on the right.

Would be nice to be able to add custom websites/panels to the bottom side of the window (maybe a good place for "pinned tabs"?

[MrSpaghetti]

Maybe I just can't find the setting, but I recently added the left sidebar to my browser, and I really like it! However, I think it would be perfect if my bookmarks weren't hidden in another context menu. I would prefer if they replaced the star icon with all of them visible.

If its not currently possible, I'm not sure why the dev team didn't consider this, because it currently adds one extra click; something that we don't have to do with bookmarks on the horizontal bar.

Would be nice to have both options !

[LanLP]

The side bar should properly hide itself when firefox enter fullscreen mode (F11)

[Nyerguds]

I just noticed that, yes. Doesn't even hide if I collapse the sidebar. Fullscreen mode should be 100% fullscreen.

[Nyerguds]

Why is there extra horizontal space before the url bar whenever I enable vertical tabs? I can't drag it away when customising, either; gives a 🚫 symbol. I can move it around, but I can't get rid of it. It gives no tooltip when I hover over it, so I can't even tell what it is. And "remove from toolbar" is also greyed out when I right click on it.

And it's only there when vertical tabs are enabled.

[Edit]

It appears to be there to ensure you have a place to grab to drag the window. So, understandable, I guess. I don't really need it though, since I got the bookmarks toolbar open below that, and the open space on that serves the same purpose. Anyway, I dragged it to the right side of my url bar now, and it's fairly unobtrusive there.

It could definitely do with some kind of feedback, though, like a hover-over tooltip in editing mode. In fact, the normal "flexible space" is also missing a tooltip in editing mode.

[turninto]

I noticed your edit after I left my comment, so I wanted to thank you here for the clarification.

In this case, though, I just wish I had more control over how the flexible space scales -- and better communication, as you said. The massive gap in the toolbar it creates when the window is maximized (mine almost always is) is an eyesore to me, as it stands.

It does at least disappear when I turn on the title bar, I'm noticing now, but for the purposes that I'm trying out the vertical sidebar (more vertical screen space), the title bar just refills the screen real estate this sidebar freed up.

Hopefully we're given a little more customization/control in the future, although I do think what this new sidebar feature offers, over all, is really nice.

[Terrhy999]

If you want to disable the flexible space entirely, you can add this to your userChrome.css file

#vertical-spacer {
display: none !important;
}

[turninto]

I'm giving it a try, and I definitely like it so far (it emphases vertical space, which is more valuable to me when I'm web-browsing), but I'm begging you to let me remove the seemingly compulsory "flexible space" filler from the toolbar. No matter how or where I try to drag-and-drop it away, it refuses to go anywhere but a different place on the toolbar. It's driving me nuts lol.

[LMauricius]

Like others have mentioned, an optional tree layout would be great! Really helps with the productivity, and is otherwise pretty unobtrusive.

I'll be using Tree Style tabs for now, but having a built-in option to hide horizontal tabs is so much better than editing userchrome.css!

[def1]

Two big things for me:

- Shortcut to toggle between expanded & favicon only view of sidebar. I like the sidebar view when focusing on firefox as main thing, but it can take up too much screen real estate when split screening if I need to say, write something & reference a web page at the same time. I'm a keyboard user, so this is one of the few things I have to click on the UI for right now.

- Please unify the "sidebar extension" interface with the rest of the extension interface. i.e. I don't see why we can't be allowed to put any extension there, for example bitwarden displays identically between the sidebar extension and the normal extension in top right. As part of this, please let us control what extensions appear there. Right now I am stuck with a useless one with takes up a whole row of the sidebar, because devs created a sidebar ui for the app, in a time where it simply came up in a dropdown. So now this slightly legacy view is cluttering the new vertical tab view!

[KasimAslan]

I really like the vertical tabs feature. My only feedback is that when using vertical tabs, it becomes harder to move the Mozilla window around, since you have to find an empty space in the toolbar to drag it. Maybe if you make it possible to move the window by clicking and dragging at the very top—like it worked with horizontal tabs—it would solve the issue.

[rgcviper]

Looks great in terms of streamlining the browser window. However, I'll wait to utilize until I can hide the tabs when I'm not using them. Bummer this option wasn't implemented from the start.

[hubbu]

I just received this update with vertical tabs, and I like the idea! However, I can't get my sidebar to look like the one in the original post by asafko. My vertical tabs won't collapse into an icon. The tabs always show the page title. I can drag to resize the sidebar, but the sidebar closes when I fit it to the icon size. Is this just me?

[stefangus]

My side bar has white icons on a light grey back ground.

When I activate the side tabs the fav's are in color but the text is white on the same light grey. I am in Dark Mode. How can I make the side bar background dark too?

[StabbyKat]

It would be great if this could be changed to be a "per window" setting instead of a global setting for all windows. I want horizontal tabs on my regular windows and vertical tabs on my media / youtube window. But as is, I have to pick or choose one for all windows.

[RodM]

I'm stunned to find that there is no option to nest and group tabs like in Tree-style tabs Extension and in Edge. For me this is the best reason for having vertical tabs. I will now go back to using Tree-style tabs rather disappointed