My whole point is that vertical tabs should be the damn default on any browser. How many people have a screen that is taller than it is wide? How many people have more than 8 tabs open at once?
> How many people have more than 8 tabs open at once?
Basically everyone I know, techie or not have many many tabs open, always. I might have 200+ at the moment? Something like that. They are hidden in containers so I don't see them all but in this current window I have maybe 20.
I never liked vertical tabs, takes up too much screen.
I've never really understood this. I might go 10 or 20 tabs deep in a browsing session if I'm researching something, but if I want to save something for later I will either bookmark it or paste links into a text file. Having hundreds of tabs open all the time just seems inefficient to me.
Well, you've just said it yourself. You used the word "session". There really is no such thing for some of us, the browser is permanently open and also opens the same tabs again if the browser has to be closed for some reason.
Edit: I mean, it's still a session - just a permanent session.
I mean I know you can sort them into folders and such with extensions but if the tabs get corrupted, or you lose your session seems like you're hosed unless you bookmarked them or saved the tab session as a backup
> How many people have more than 8 tabs open at once?
Don't most people? I basically always do. And yes, I'm a techie, but anecdotally I see many non-techies with zillions of browser tabs open because they barely notice that tabs are even a feature and so they continually allow new ones to be opened without going back and closing anything.
I have hundreds of open tabs in FF most of the time and rarely close them. I use it a bit like emacs; ignore the "tab bar" and use ctrl-tab (with browser.ctrlTab.sortByRecentlyUsed set to true) or tab search (with %) to jump between them. The only reason I need to clean up my tabs now and then is the RAM usage.
Not really true any longer, almost all modern browsers will background (unload) tabs when you get more than N windows (or memory % consumption). I think you have to turn that behavior off if you don't want it via about:config chrome://flags
Of course they don't notice the tabs - once you get over ~8, you'd have to scroll to see them.
I can see 40 tabs with 40 characters of tab name in a single window (actually, I pin 3 rows of 8 tabs, which takes up 3 tab spaces, so I can see 24 pinned tabs and 37 full size)
Vertical tabs take a much larger fraction of your screen than horizontal tabs. The entire original USP of Chrome was that the “Chrome” part of the browser window took the absolute bare minimum space in the screen letting you focus on the content. I think people still psychologically expect that to be true.
I wanted to love vertical tabs but I just keep going back. If you have multiple browsers open side by side it gets annoying how much screen the tabs take up.
I use a slightly customised version of tree style tabs to great effect. Actually uses the horizontal bar to show pinned / recent tabs (which time out and hide) and an overlaid / toggle-hidden sidebar for the full list of group-organised tabs.
You can always just toggle the vertical tab view per window, so you don't lose any horizontal screen real estate unless you need them. And at least in Firefox you can remove the existing horizontal tabs using userChrome[1].
Docs in a browser window, next to an editor window, while working with a library that isn't very familiar. Granted, this works better on a display of meaningful size, but I do it a lot and vertical tabs would waste noticeable space.
On the other hand, I have good tab discipline in general, so vertical tabs would waste even more space by virtue of dedicating a lot of real estate for displaying next to nothing. But who needs all those tabs anyway?
While doing research, each search yields numerous links that I need to evaluate so I'll open them all in tabs and then I go through them as a task list to whittle down.
I have a whole window for just email + comms. I have several different businesses that all use separate email, etc in containers.
I also have several interests where each gets its own window and has up to 24 pinned tabs of key sites for that topic. These are not business, so I don't have time pressure to whittle down the tabs that I open.
I currently have 368 tabs open and they are all easy to access: Select a window by topic (I use the Titler extension to name windows) and I have 3 rows of 8 tabs pinned at the top and up to 37 tabs with 40 characters of tab name space. So in each window, I can see 61 tabs without scrolling.
“ I can’t imagine why anyone wouldn’t use vertical threads”
“ doesn’t work on small screens”
“Get a bigger screen”
Consider that most people don’t care to even if they have the money. I sure don’t care for a bigger screen. I find myself more productive in a small screen anyway.
There are plenty of use cases so I'm sure it varies.
For example, I often have my browser on the left side and my editor on the right. With only 50% of the width, I sometimes prefer to reclaim the horizontal space and switch back to horizontal tabs.
While I agree that vertical tabs make sense, personally I never use desktop browsers in fullscreen (nor almost any other application other than IDEs). So I’m probably f’ed anyway with regard to fingerprinting.
okay, people need to stop treating digital canvases like an analog surface. It doesn't matter what dimensions your screen is. The paradigm for virtually every application on a computer is to scroll vertically, so practically that space is unlimited.
What people want to do is fit stuff side-by-side and move up and down, rarely ever the other way around. That's why vertical tabs make no sense in most contexts. It's why narrow-width fonts exist, those columns are valuable real estate as soon as you have another window pulled up to the left or right, there's virtually no case where a few rows made a difference.
Basically everyone I know, techie or not have many many tabs open, always. I might have 200+ at the moment? Something like that. They are hidden in containers so I don't see them all but in this current window I have maybe 20.
I never liked vertical tabs, takes up too much screen.