[ectopod]

I don't know why tabs and taskbars go at the top and bottom of the screen by default. This is exactly where the space isn't. Every screen is wide.

The taskbar can be moved easily, but Firefox doesn't come with a vertical tabs option. Both Chrome and Edge seem to now.

[derefr]

IIRC tab bars are optimized for the most-common usage scenario where you only have two or three tabs open. In that case, running horizontally across the top/bottom of the screen means each tab gets to be wide-enough to show a large amount of text, maximizing the amount of context the tab can give for what it's about.

Vertical tabs are stuck in a side-bar, and that sidebar has to fight with the main content for screen real-estate, with the tab bar usually losing (i.e. getting shrunk by the user in order to increase the size of the main content.) That means that, even with only a few tabs open, a tabs sidebar can't show very much description text for each tab.

When you have a lot of tabs, a tab sidebar shows more per-tab context than a tab top/bottom bar does. But having a lot of tabs is comparatively rare.

[GoOnThenDoTell]

I’ve never met anyone who only had a few tabs open at a time

[derefr]

It’s less “having only a few tabs open at once” and more “having a few tabs per window, in many windows.” People who exclusively use tabs are rare compared to people who mostly use windows and sometimes use tabs.

Remember, the default behaviour in all major browsers is to open external links from other applications in a new window. So, if you’re the regular “go with the flow” kind of computer user who presumes the defaults are defaults for a reason — and are a bit lazy in cleaning up your windows, and you use at least one external app (e.g. a mail client, a piece of collaboration software, etc.) — then even if you yourself prefer to open tabs, you’ll end up opening new windows quite frequently as well.

And, if you don’t care where you open each new tab, you’ll just end up opening it against whichever window was most recently opened; rather than having a dedicated “tabs I opened” window.

(As a person who bothered to install the “Merge Windows” Chrome extension to replicate the feature in Safari, I genuinely don’t get these people — but they really do exist, and are even seemingly in the majority.)

[CRConrad]

Not only Firefox but AFAIK most browsers -- at least on Windows -- have interpreted "target=new" as new tab, not window, for several years now. "Open in new tab" is also the first alternative on the right-click menu, before "Open in new window".

Also, BTW, Firefox has had a Tabs menu for years now; both vertical and hides itself away automatically. (Though perhaps you still can't save any vertical space with it: AFAICR it lives on the tab bar, so if you hide that you lose the menu too.)

[pmontra]

This is very true for monitors especially with affordable 24+ inches high density models.

Actually, the screen of my laptops got only slightly wider in the last 25 years but considerably shorter. 16:9 is bad on laptops.

This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

[webmaven]

> This means that an Ubuntu like launcher (on a side) should be optimal and yet it takes away the space I need to display two windows side by side.

> That's why I always reconfigure Gnome to move the top bar to the bottom and merge it with a task bar. I also autohide it to gain some space.

Why not use the autohide option with the launcher on the side?

[pmontra]

Because I don't need the launcher. I start most of the programs I need on boot and they go on for weeks until the next reboot (emacs, terminals, browsers, Thunderbird, keepassx, Telegram and 32 GB of RAM.) I use a virtual desktop (a Gnome activity?) per project so I have very few windows open per desktop and I alt tab between them. One browser window per desktop, one terminal per desktop, one emacs frame per desktop, Slack, etc. BTW, I wish that desktop Slack had an option to display multiple windows. Doing it in a browser is obvious but the desktop app is better than the browser one, so I drag it into another desktop when I change project. I run the other programs by pressing the windows key and typing their name, not every day or week. What I use my bottom bar for is to access the icons in the notification bar. Glance at the time, open or close a VPN, take a screenshot with Flameshot. I also placed the favorites menu there (some extension?) to start the file manager. I'm using Nemo instead of Nautilus because I like to predictably access files and folders with type ahead. I occasionally use the bottom bar to click on the name of a dining program and it's nice to have see them side by side as in old Windows versions.

[pmontra]

I can't edit my message anymore: a "dining program" is what my phone's autocorrect thinks a "running program" is doing. Dining on CPUs :-)

BTW, the Gnome's name for favorites is Places.

[md5wasp]

Does Chrome have a vertical tabs mode?! Because the primary reason I use Firefox is because it _does_ have a vertical tabs mode, via use of TreeStyleTabs and some userChrome.css hacks.