

Tabs on the side? - KeithMajhor
http://www.azarask.in/blog/post/firefoxnext-tabs-on-the-side/

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unicornporn
I've used the Tree Style Tab extension ( <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
US/firefox/addon/5890/> ) for more than a year now and I have a very hard time
browsing without it. Makes a lot of sense with today's widescreen displays.
Only thing that bugs me with it is that I can only use the default Firefox
theme on OS X. If I change theme it breaks really bad.

~~~
zalew
One thing that TST really lacks is grouping as on OPs screenshot. I wish I
could make a group of 'unclosable' tabs which I have always open such as
Gmail, Bitbucket, Tadalist, and have casual browsing in other group, after a
separator.

~~~
unicornporn
Yeah, that'd be a good thing. I tend to keep permanent tabs (last.fm,
grooveshark etc) in a separate window (2 windows in total). When/if I close
Firefox I just chose to "Save and Quit" and the tabs are still there when I
restart. Not optimal at all, but works for pages that I don't follow links in
new tabs from.

~~~
zalew
I use chrome for music (currently mixcloud playing), this way I can restart ff
without stopping music. And have it on the 3rd or 4th workspace so it doesn't
bother me on my working ones

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tlrobinson
No thanks.

* Vertical height is scarce... unless you're trying to fit two windows side-by-side.

* The nice thing about horizontal tabs is when they fill up the tab bar they just shrink rather than disappearing. You can't really shrink vertical tabs.

* I'd rather have my tabs take up 30px by [screen width] than 200px by [screen height]. This looks very wasteful of space.

* The default state of the browser is a single tab, in which case tons of space would be wasted. In applications where most of the space is usually used (a hierarchical file browser, for example) the vertical orientation makes more sense.

~~~
wippler
Don't you think it will improve vertical space if tabs goes to side, also
these days all the laptops have widescreen - this will be quite useful there.

As for the default state of the browser, the tab bar can be made to appear
only when second tab is opened or something like that.

~~~
pedrokost
The way I often use the browser is having one window next to the other. If I
had tabs on the side, this would no longer be possible. Nevertheless, i once
gave a try to tabs on side, bud it only convinced me that this is not very
useful.

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cgs1019
The tree style tabs extension for Firefox is what kept me from (eventually)
switching to Chrome. Chrome is superior in a lot of ways but I do wish they'd
make the layout a bit more customizable/extensible.

~~~
agazso
With the latest Chrome you can try the --enable-vertical-tabs command line
option.

See: [http://www.howtonew.com/how-to-move-chrome-tabs-to-the-
left-...](http://www.howtonew.com/how-to-move-chrome-tabs-to-the-left-side-
tabs) [http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-chrome-
labs....](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2010/08/google-chrome-labs.html)

~~~
w01fe
I was waiting for Tree Style Tabs to switch to Chrome, finally gave up and
switched anyway two weeks ago. While the vertical tabs option does exist in
Chrome, it's inferior to the Firefox offering in a number of ways. In
particular, there's no tab grouping / collapsing, and the UI is really still
ugly and not themable (at least on OSX, tabs retain their 'top tabs' shape,
there's an unchangeable blue background on the tab bar, and tab dragging does
not work properly). IMO, not ready for prime time yet ... hopefully soon
though.

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yycom
This app-specific myopia drives me nuts. As other commentators have noted, the
right place for the tab functionality is in the _window manager_. The effort
would be better spent working with desktop vendors to support a cross-platform
and cross-application tiling and tabbing API.

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barrkel
Unfortunately, I use cascaded windows as a way of selecting which window I
want active. I detailed my technique here:
[http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-
win...](http://blog.barrkel.com/2009/11/on-difficulty-of-setting-
windows-7.html)

This means that my browser window, in its natural shape for cascaded windows
on a wide screen, is approximately square: the left hand side of the wide
screen is filled with the left edges of smaller windows (mostly terminals,
sometimes with status text scrolling by, busy compiling or with other jobs),
with the bottom-left corner of the screen containing desktop widgets telling
me about my CPU/GPU temperatures and the current time in California.

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lhnz
I moved the Windows start bar to the left, and I moved my firefox tabs to the
left.

It just makes a lot more sense, seeing that most other apps (Outlook,
Explorer) I use also have their hierarchy on the left...

~~~
alexitosrv
I had been using that setup for years and its a great way to maximize screen
area (although using Opera). In Mac OS X, I also have the dock in the left.

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seltzered
I've experimented with tabs on the side for a while (tree-tabs in FF, and
vertical tabs in chrome). While side tabs work nice when your browser consumes
the whole screen, I usually work by having two browser instances (one on the
left, one on the right) instead. At that point, horizontal screen real estate
becomes more crucial.

I figured aza's tab candy (panorama) is really the nice compromise in letting
you organize tabs (a la treetabs). It just needs to be refined to where it can
be set as the home page so you get used to that workflow.

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bodhi
Once you get past a certain number of tabs[1], neither horizontal or vertical
works very well. I'd like to see a browser that worked along the same lines as
Emacs' buffers, where you have no tabs, but an ability to show a list of open
pages, and a quick way to switch directly to the page you want. 'C-x b gmail',
along with an IDO clone would be great.

[1] I have 103 tabs currently open. Writing that makes me feel like an idiot!

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ranza
I like my tabs on the top. This is a great though if your more of a tabs on
the side kind of guy.

I use a 24" screen i rotate for keeping websites nice and long. Same goes for
code. Its great for keeping more lines of code and text on a screen.

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signa11
do window-managers support title-bar on the side ? should be useful i think.

