Native Vertical Tabs

[Gecko]

From the previous post on Crowdicity:

I would like to see vertical tabs baked in. MS Edge now has it out of the box!

I currently use addons for this - but there's no way to disable the top tab bar, which duplicates the tabs and takes up space.

Vertical tabs (with top bar disabled) would free up more space for web content, which is (usually) vertical. Most screens are widescreen (RIP ThinkPad 4:3 ratios), so the less browser UI at the top/bottom, the more content we can view.

The original post received 154 votes and as such was the 3rd highest voted post in the "General" category.

[asafko]

Hi folks,

We have landed the first, very early version of vertical tabs for you to try out in the latest Nightly. Please see more details in this post.

Please note that we have not yet landed the patch that removes the empty space of the navigation bar and forces application controls in one line. Hopefully, this will land sometime in August, so you might want to wait for that improvement. We are also making updates and improvements to the experience daily, so please hang in there while we improve it.

[Kazper]

This is great news! I'll try it out (well aware of the work that still needs to be done) a bit in the coming days. Great work!

[panosl]

Is there a way to define a keyboard shortcut to toggle the whole sidebar on macOS?

The options up till now are:

• cmd+B for Bookmarks
• cmd+shift+H for History

I don't see an option for the whole sidebar. There is a Show/Hide sidebars toolbar button. Ideally I'd like to have a way to toggle it with a shortcut.

Also the Hide sidebar option does not seem to take effect ever.

Let me know if I should raise an issue for those.

Other than that, thank you for making it a native option.

[Zhangdd]

When the Vertical tabs is turned on, the search suggestions in the search box will coincide with the bookmarks

[moppelg]

Sorry for not reading all 20 pages:
but here my 50 cents: Please also enable the possibility to put the adress/seach/navigation bar on the side. That would give more valuable vertical space for browsing.

On the other hand for most cases the vertical bar should have enough space to take the navbar on board. Furthermore to see all >400 letters of a full blown html adress is usually not of value.

Best regards

Markus

[NeoX]

Vertical Tabs

Respected Sir, the most important feature at current time is the vertical tabs and with the help of vertical tabs the user is able to open hundreds of open tabs and remain in control of those hundreds of open tabs. Sir I have been waiting for the launch of vertical tabs in the Mozilla Firefox for a considerable time but the vertical tabs have not been introduced till now. Sir if the vertical tabs are introduced in the Mozilla Firefox then a substantial number of people of the world will migrate to the Mozilla Firefox. Sir the period of horizontal tabs has gone and the current time belongs to the vertical tabs.

[Jon]

(Note: similar ideas have been merged into this thread)

[Jon]

@NeoX thanks for the suggestion! We're actually working on vertical tabs right now, and it's actually available to try out in Firefox Nightly — learn more here:

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

[tehm]

I've just recently switched to vertical tabs. If anyone's interested, they're already available in the stable channel, hidden behind config (navigate to `about:config` and enable `sidebar.verticalTabs`).

I prefer to keep them expanded, because I have more than 5 tabs pinned (while not expanded I have to scroll the pinned tabs part to find what I want). Overall the experience is very nice. I've finally reclaimed some of that precious vertical space and now have a consistent experience with my "required-at-work" browser.

Thanks again to the Devs for making it possible. This was one feature I lacked to have a perfect browsing experience.

[Burrobabe]

Yes, we need vertical tabs as native to Firefox.  I have tried the extensions for vertical tabs and they are too complex for me to even set up. Furthermore, I attempted to get help via Github and NO ONE would even deign to answer my questions! If you can't code, you can't understand or use such complex add-ons.

[tehm]

Ok, so I'm a few week in to testing the vertical tabs (stable channel - enabled with the `vertical-tabs` option in `about:config`) and they work quite well. A few quirks I see here:

• pinned tabs - while the layout's nice, dragging seems to work incorrectly: while vertically works fine, horizontally causes whatever icon you're dragging to hit the left edge and stay there (cannot drag it towards the right edge);
• window decorations - while this might be OS-related, both Windows and Linux/GNOME still have that empty space at the top, filled only with standard window icons on the right (minimize, maximize/restore, close)m but honestly I don't know if anything can be done here to improve this (hiding it perhaps with a separate option?).

Other than that the vertical tabs work nicely. No tab grouping (yet), but it's not a necessity in my case. There're containers, but that's a different feature and it seems to work. The whole experience is almost complete in my opinion. 😊

[asafko]

@tehm Hi! Thank you so much for your feedback! We're working on snappier drag-n-drop for the pinned tabs. Can I please ask you to update to the very latest version of the stable channel and check if you still see the nav bar at the top? It should be gone by now.

[jmikhail]

I have been using the native vertical tabs on beta versions of Firefox in both Windows and Linux, and let me just say a big congratulations to the team for their work so far. Many of the earlier issues have been resolved and I am extremely happy with the overall functionality.

My only future wishlist requests would be:

1. The ability to drag tabs over each other to create groups, akin to the native tab grouping functionality that Edge offers.
2. The ability to see a preview of the page in the tooltip when you hover over a tab

With these added features, I think the implementation would be pretty close to perfect 😊

[tehm]

@asafkoJust updated to 133.0 on Windows and Linux. Beautiful - the top window bar is gone and everything (the window buttons) is inline with the navigation bar. Some more vertical space saved. At this point I'm almost totally happy with the experience. The drag'n'drop on pinned tabs is not a show-stopper (neither was the top bar). The screenshot is from GNOME/Wayland, 200% HiDPI setting (I'm transitioning from Windows, so not much tabs are open or pinned yet) - looking good. 🙂

@jmikhailI can see some tooltips on GNOME/Wayland working. It that what you were referring to?

[Burrobabe]

Until it allows tab grouping, I don't find the vertical tabs feature very useful.

Is it necessary to switch to a beta version to try out the vertical tabs at this point?