Same here when the Raising the Bar reprint releases. I never managed to get the first edition, so I'm beyond excited they decided to make a second one after all this time. And as a fan, I need to have it.
The reprint with added content is wonderful news. I have a prized copy and wish I had the space for a coffeetable by which to flaunt and share it.
As neat as it is to see how rare it is these days (w.r.t. the asking prices I currently see online), I've always wished other fans could enjoy and appreciate it as much as I have.
That’s pretty nice and intuitive. The panning is heavy as expected, the emoji picker surprisingly quiet. But something is seriously wrong with the context menus.
Yeah, the part where he’s talking about „his startup“ not being all in, because he wants to do consulting as a fallback. Turns out that’s a little dishonest since he has a whole agency where benched employees work on „his startups“.
In the comments he goes on to say he’s based in India and people there can’t use intercom for some reason, so that’s why „he’s building“ some knockoffs.
Way different reality from what the first half of the original post makes it seem.
I guess this is some kind of meta commentary about not trusting startup influencers. While the post has some good parts, there’s also some godawful advice sprinkled in there.
Found a recent screenshot of it on Reddit. Looks good, I hope it has similar nesting like Tree Style Tab though. In my opinion that is still the best implementation of this idea across all browsers.
Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either – but it does have groups and profiles. They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more, so I'm glad they finally found some time to do this.
> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more
I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
I mostly agree, and don't get all the fuss about Chrome (or any other browser's) UI. To me they look all very similar and function very similarly. The differences just don't seem that big of a deal. I think it is mostly people being resistant to change. I had one friend that I convinced to switch to FireFox after a year[0]. A month after he switched over I got him to admit that it was easy to switch and there's no real change.
> it took a week of tinkering
I wish this was more obvious, but there is a user.js file that Firefox looks at[1,2,3]. You can edit this and carry it around in a dotfiles or something.
> They really need to get out of this stale and boring state and innovate more
I'm just as excited as you are for side tabs, but I don't think browsers need to be constantly innovating their UI. In fact, the last time Firefox did that it took a week of tinkering to get it back to a usable state, and I now have the constant "Compact (Unsupported)" layout hovering over me, reminding me that one day I'll probably have to tinker even more.
I use the browser for at least 8 hours a day, I don't need the experience constantly changing, it's a tool. "stale" and "boring" is also "stable" and "dependable".
[0] Argument is about having legitimate browser competition and the privacy boost of containerizing what data Google could (keyword) collect. I'd really only bring it up when he'd be complaining about Chrome or Google, so quite often.
On the one hand, I completely agree with you (I can prove it with a pile of tools restoring the layout to something more compact), but on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
The last innovation that really made a difference for me was the reader mode. I'm sure changing the relationship between tabs and bookmarks would improve things even more, and being able to treat my history as a knowledge store would make web browsing even better.
But even then, I don't want such experiments in my main browser. That's supposed to be dependable. Maybe what I want is a separate browser/profile/mode where features trickle into my main browser after I am comfortable with them.
> on the other hand, I am deeply disappointed with the state of current browser experience.
Are there specific problems you keep running into? Or is this more a desire they were constantly improving?
My attitude tends to be that every new improvement is just something I risk getting used to and then getting sad when it (inevitably) breaks for me. So these days I just want to use as few features on my computer as possible.
We all have to consume to produce. But there's value in maximizing the yield. Produce a lot while needing to consume as little as possible. Seems more resilient for my own habits.
I keep running into the problem of not being able to find the website I visited. If the concept is not in the URL or the page title, it might as well not exist in the history.
I run into the problem of disappearing documents. Neither bookmarks nor tabs provide persistence. There are online services which save documents, but I don't want to rely ona third party to keep my stuff.
I often want to annotate a document before I bookmark it, so that I know why I should come back to it, and what the relevant sections are.
On top of that, I don't know what bookmarks are relative to tabs. Both are kind of bad at organizing knowledge.
I'd love to try out new paradigms for the sake of more power, but have a safe, reliable browser to return to if the new thing turns out a bad idea. Sure, things take effort to maintain and get taken away. But it's a battle of mindshare. If there are no early adopters, no feature will ever become big enough to be resilient.
I can totally relate to all of that. My current approach to it is to fill in the gaps in browsers using other tools. Minimize dependence on both tabs and bookmarks since they suck so much. An editor containing my notes open next to the browser. Making copies of things I care about (and giving them good backups) as it's become clear that we can't depend on anything to last out in the world.
I've actually started to think that this kind of hodge-podge of tools is a good thing. Software is hard, bugs are inevitable. Multiple tools from different authors make my setup more resilient. Tools keep growing more complex; adding features to a single tool only exacerbates that trend. I also feel a greater sense of agency. I'm not at the mercy of my tool provider, I can identify problems and solve them for myself.
Multiple tools from multiple people make it less likely that the entire ecosystem is going to collapse, but makes it likelier that any one tool will stop working.
But that's not even my main problem. Integration is. Integration consolidates ideas in ways that can be packaged and spread to others, increasing the mind share of the paradigm. Unless a good solution is integrated, it will be the domain of a few hardcore adherents. Once an integrated solution appears, it will become resilient only by the virtue of being popular and cared about (I guess as long as it's free software).
The flip side is that a modern web browser integrates so many things not core to any data management idea that few dare experiment with it.
I'm curious about the Arc browser, but I won't bet my workflows on it unless it becomes open source.
When you ctrl+S to save a page, by default the first attempt fails, as evidenced by the warning icon in the Downloads button. You click it again to save it, and naturally it redownloads and reexecutes the page and all its resources again. Likewise if you save an already open image, more often than not even when it was just loaded, it will need to be downloaded again.
It's a catch-22 because if you stop innovating your UI for 20 years and alternatives come up with something people actually like then you will lose users to them and slowly fade into irrelevancy.
Firefox succeeded because it was a fresh take on the entire browser UX at a time when Internet Explorer had been stagnant for half a decade.
As I remember it, Firefox succeeded because it fundamentally worked well and was very configurable, not because of the UX. The others at the time were bad at both of those things.
The UX of Firefox was (and, I'd argue, still is) not great, but it made up for that by being configurable enough that you could fix it for yourself.
Firefox (Phoenix / Firebird) initially got its userbase from the Mozilla userbase which was this capable browser with many features and flexibility (extensions), but it was bloated, slow, with a kinda outdated (non-native) UI. Firefox's differing feature was its lightness and (native-like, per-platform) UI freshness, not configurability.
FF success against IE was mainly caused by Microsoft completely dropping the ball by simply not developing IE for a couple of years. I think one of the elementary features which has driven mass FF adoption was tabbing support, which IE6 didn't have.
Everyone I knew who wasn't working in tech that switched to Firefox did so because tabs were this revolutionary new thing that transformed their browsing experience.
Of course, Firefox wasn't the first browser to offer tabs, but it was the first that was also fast, highly compatible, and easy for the average person to pick up and use. It's predecessor, the Mozilla suite, included all the same extensibility and customization, but it was also a bloated mess that nobody wanted to use.
In my opinion, Firefox has never been particularly good. I tried it when it first came out - it was slow and a memory hog. Using IE6 was a much better experience, so I stayed there. It was only once Chrome came out that we had an actual good alternative to IE, and I switched immediately once I tried it.
I would love for Firefox to be awesome, but ultimately (in my subjective opinion of course) it just kind of sucks and always has.
I think the best vertical tabs implementation in firefox is Sidebery. The use of "panes" to group tabs is brilliant. Older versions were buggy, but version 5 has been rock solid for me.
Can't agree more, have been using sidebery for about a month now, and even completely dropped chromium which I ran beside firefox for the last years to only running firefox with sideberry and container-tabs now.
I've been using vertical tabs (first TreeStyleTabs, now Sideberry for the last ~6 months) and I'm in the same boat.
Chrome is faster, snappier and works better on more websites I commonly use, but the fact that I cannot have "vertical tabs as trees" ruins the entire browser experience for me, so it's basically the only reason I use Firefox for the last decade or something.
Add NoScript and Firefox will be much faster than Chrome. It will make you aware of how much untrusted code poorly developed sites expect you to run on their behalf.
Well, turn off JavaScript in Chrome and you back to Chrome being faster. Turning off JS is obviously not a solution when the complaint is that (assuming the same amount of work) Chrome is faster for some JS.
NoScript doesn't turn off javascript. It allows you to selectively disable some scripts while whitelisting others. You can't use much of the modern web without JS but you can neuter the dozens of trackers and ad bloat some sites insist on running on your computer.
Running uBlock Origin in “Medium mode” [1] also does wonders (= blocking 3p-scripts and frames).
It’s interesting to see how many websites work in this mode, and the amount of crap you’re not seeing. Websites load so much faster. And, you can then (permanently, or not) easily whitelist some specific domains like content providers, etc. while browsing.
How have I not heard about this in the bajillion times I whined about tab groups?
I kinda dislike that Firefox only have one good option that involves completely hiding each group currently not in use, but it functioned ith their tab containers which made it worth the hassle.
How do panes scale for many groups? Can you manage 20, 30 panes? Or does it become annoying at this amount?
Sidebery is nice, but it's missing an API allowing other addons to interact with it. This is a big benefit of Tree Style Tabs, especially as you can even exploit it as a user.
I use Sidebery, and I added some custom userChrome.css to have the sidebar collapse to only take up 36px, and expand on hover, absolutely love using it
I switched to sideberry a while back, and yeah - very much agreed, it's leagues ahead of others in terms of base experience breadth (container tabs and whatnot are fully integrated) and customization options.
Their wiki also has a very simple and effective userChrome.css tweak to hide the top tab bar when the side panel is open. That's a rather crucial vertical space savings on a small laptop.
I've added commands to Tridactyl that expand/collapse the tabs I'm on in Tree Style Tabs, using their javascript API. Does Sidebery have anything like that?
Firefox has profiles. It's just not very user-friendly.
But Chrome tabs don't even have horizontal scrolling. If you work with, say, more than 10 tabs, Chrome squashes them, and the more tabs you have open, the less usable it becomes. Meanwhile, Firefox has horizontal scrolling and neat (geeky) options for navigating lots of tabs.
The most important part of profiles is being able to right-click on a link and open it in a different profile. I don't see that mentioned. I typically have multiple profiles open at once.
Edge has the best implementation where you can define sites opening in certain profiles. Pity ms ruined that browser - it is completely untrustworthy with it auto turning on options such as syncing.
Also on Firefox you can hold CTRL+T / CTRL+W to open / close multiple tabs, CTRL+Click or SHIFT+Click to select multiple tabs at once and then e.g. move them to another window or close them, etc.
I always assumed Chrome also had all of these features, including scrolling, etc.
The lack of horizontal scrolling in Chrome and most chrome-based browsers drives me absolutely crazy, it's such a basic feature...
Firefox on the other hand has terrible support for profiles, I've been using Arc which is good but has worse performance when working with a lot of tabs (hundreds)
I can't take a browser seriously unless it's open source. Arc may be the best browser of them all in terms of features, but I'd never consider it as an alternative to anything until it opens up its source code. We shouldn't trust a closed-source browser.
And usually stop working because they used up all the memory.
I went back to Firefox after a week of using Chrome. Chrome is not compatible with my 100+ open tabs.
FF has said that they are finally adding groups, too, but I haven't heard anything about the timing of that. I'm really looking forward to that as I currently use a plugin for that and would love to drop the third-party plugin for something native. I'm always worried about the risk of a third-party plugin like that with such broad access.
I'm a project manager and use it to manage about 200 tabs in about 12 groups. Each group represents a project and I switch between projects several times a day. Groups lets me keep those pages open and provides fast switching.
I don't quite see them that way either, but, I further see tab grouping, tab hiding and profile groups as three separate parts of the same overall feature. And Simple Tab Groups directly supported Containers since day 1, so I personally always really found this distinction a bit more lexical than practical.
I absolutely love the hiding feature and find Containers incomplete without them. What's the point of switching context if the context is still visible there at all times? At that point, let me just use a different User. And I'd find Simple Tab Groups weirdly incomplete as well if they insisted on hiding tabs but not providing Container functionality. Because tab groups with hiding don't feel "ephemeral" enough. Takes too long to make a group, and the interface changes too much when jumping around. That dissuades me from going on tangents online and then grouping that tangent and keeping it on the side temporarily. Chrome's approach is better for that latter thing.
I want something in between. Something that let's you see all groups on a single bar or on a tree bar, and then further groups that can be containers and switch the bar. Chrome was close with their group save+hide feature, but they eat into the bookmarks bar with no options about where.
I'm not talking about Tab Containers. I don't need to segregate sessions/accounts or such.
Tab Groups is a way to be able to swap sets of tabs within a window. I can have groups for each of projects A, B, and C. Each project group can have a couple dozen tabs. When I switch groups, I only see the tabs for that group. I alternate among several projects each day and need to keep the pages live. Without groups, it is impossible to manage all of the tabs.
> Firefox' UI has kinda stagnated. It's not like other browsers are far ahead – Chrome doesn't have vertical tabs either
Brave has had vertical tabs for.. more than half a year now. Maybe a year?
On top of that it has a sidebar, it has a built-in adblocker, the rest of the settings are more hardened than default Firefox, they do tonnes of research (https://brave.com/research/), including really cool one's like SugarCoat that benefit everyone.
Brave is basically the promise Firefox left unfulfilled.
I've liked Vivaldi a lot, including it's support for vertical tabs which I consider essential at this point. And they don't constantly mess around with the UI for no reason, unlike Chrome and Firefox. My main major gripe with it, is that it's closed source. I can see Brave is at least MPL, so I think I'll take a look at it.
The unfortunate thing is that Firefox could be the perfect platform for browser UI experimentation if more care were put into making the project easier to fork and reasonable to keep up to date with mainline.
A few months ago I played with forking it for my own tinkering but bailed because it seemed likely to turn into a rolling mass of merge conflicts if I were to make anything but minor changes.
Some forks are using a nice patch based system: see how the Zen browser is built for instance (https://github.com/zen-browser/desktop/). I think that's a better model than merging upstream updates into your own branch.
> ... it does have groups and profiles.
You probably know this, but Firefox has its own version of profiles, although its a bit hidden.
You can see the profiles by going to about:profiles or launching Firefox with -ProfileManager as a cli option, which launches a profile manager window.
Container tabs are a much more powerful alternative to 'profiles'.
Profiles are nice for multiple people sharing a pc/account, container-tabs are for seperating online persona's or work/private browsing
FYI you also need a bit of custom CSS to get rid of the title bar if you want to replicate this screenshot. By default if you turn on vertical tabs you still have an empty title bar across the top.
Changing things just for the sake of changing them is the great bane of modern software. Consistency is a valuable feature! Don't throw it away without a VERY good reason! Meaning improving things is fine, changing them just for the sake of what some SV arsehole things is "modern" and "fresh" is not.
This a feature that Firefox originally had but removed.
In the older versions, Firefox preferences contained a dropdown that let users choose whether to show tabs on the top, bottom, left, or right side of the browser window.
In case it helps any reader, I recently discovered the [cmd + shift + a] / [control + shift + a] shortcut in chrome for ‘vertical tabs-ish’ in searchable form
Yeah, definitely a way to end up with a Siri like mess if you do this long enough. The use case is there and it’s going to be very useful, but the magic is wearing off.
No, you're most certainly not alone. Very few icons are intuitively understandable, although even the folks at Nielsen Norman have trouble backing that up with data (as linked below).
What immediately came to my mind was Autodesk Maya, where they have similar menus that use text only labels (see the screenshot from their manual). They have a lot of very abstract and complicated features, so every bit of usability counts.
I wanted to say my Figma plugins that I made for myself, but I published them so it doesn't count.
When I was around 15 I wanted to try out Win Forms. I also used to play a lot of Dota 2 so I created this app to calculate how many Techies mines would to take down a hero with X HP. Complete with sliders, input field, radio buttons and checkboxes to select ability levels and items. Pretty sure it will never get published, but the .exe is still sitting on my desktop.
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