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by addicted 2725 days ago
What vertical tabs allow you to do is forgo tab management all together. With vertical tabs, you never really close a tab, but instead, you keep working on the small subset of tabs you opened most recently. Because they are in a vertical space, even though you have a hundred tabs open, the titles of the 5 or so tabs you are working on are as easily visible as they would be if they were the only open tabs.

OTOH, with horizontal tabs, once you’ve reached a certain number of tabs, they all condense into indistinguishable icons, and even before they have, you can easily only see a couple of the tabs entire titles at a time (on a laptop screen).

So even if you don’t manage tens or hundreds of tabs (although many others do), vertical tabs are still useful because they allow you to never have to think about closing a tab, and still have a great experience with the 5-10 tabs you are interested in at any one point of time.
1 comments
andrewaylett 2725 days ago
Firefox doesn't behave as you've described -- I've got 27 tabs opened at the moment (probably the lowest count for months) and only 22 are on-screen, the rest have scrolled off to the left. All have enough context left in them for me to be fairly sure what they are. And if I do want to look at them all, there's a handy drop-down to the right of the tab bar which will show them all in a vertical list. Although I often have enough tabs open to need to scroll that list...

That's Firefox, and while I've got plenty of extensions, none are affecting my tab behaviour.

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sfink 2724 days ago
No, you're right. The comment you're replying to is specific to Chrome. Firefox behaves as you describe, though personally I still strongly prefer TST's behavior; it's a substantial further improvement over Firefox's default setup. Especially when you add in container tabs, and the ability to prefix url bar searches with % <space> to search through your open tabs.

Some people seem to strongly prefer Chrome's behavior. The only advantage I can see is that it forcibly prevents your tab count from getting out of hand.

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