Why do you weirdos want tabs on the sidebar anyway?
Monitors are horizontal, webpages are vertical. Horizontal tabs waste precious space.
It always bothers me about this whole vertical tab concept, that, on a theoretical level, I'm fully on board with what you're saying. But in practice, I'll often have Firefox tiled side-by-side with another window, and then it's painful for that sidebar to take up any space at all.
I am happy, though, that this feature is being integrated for the people that find it useful.
Not if you need to see all those tabs you're hoarding.
You also read page titles horizontally, making it easy to skim tab page titles.
Exactly. Monitors are horizontal. Tab names are horizontal. They should be listed vertically with the names written horizontally. You can hide them if you need to, but I find my monitor has plenty of space.
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That would work well with my dual 32" 4K monitors
I'm not so sure it would work well on a 15" laptop. It's easier to scroll vertically than horizontally
Try using tree style tabs, it's really great. Most websites are laid out such that there's tons of wasted horizontal space and vertical space is limited, so you increase usable screen space by moving tabs to the side. Additionally, with tabs at the top, the more tabs you have, the harder they are to read and keep organized. With tree style tabs, no matter how many you have, they're always maximally readable, and the ability to nest them and collapse groups gives you a ton of power organization wise. You can also easily hide the sidebar when you DO need the extra horizontal space. The ability to bookmark groups of tabs at once makes it much easier to keep close tabs you aren't actively using.
We spend so much time using web browsers, why not optimize them for human use?
I find them much more natural and easy to manage
For big ass monitors, that usually have left space at the sides.
You can nest them
Edit: the pettiness to downvote this comment lmao
It's also easiert to read the titles of the tabs.
Reading that thread is painful. He complains about a feature that is in testing because he didn't know he could enable it and then complains because it doesn't work like how he wants it to even though he just had to expand the sidebar.
He complains about the priority given.
@marsup They started working on one of these projects this year and it’s shipping. The other has been in the works for a decade. Guess which one is getting priority.
source. He is also very aware it's not ready and even says so
@ePD5qRxX @marsup It's very cool that this is possible, but (a) if you have to activate them in about:config, it's not really “ready"
I agree with him. Mozilla's priorities have been wack for more than a decade.
I don't understand what he's saying at all, though.
They announced both initiatives, LLM and built-in sidebar tabs, I think, even in the same blog post.
An LLM is much easier to integrate, of course it's going to be ready a few months earlier.I do not understand what was supposedly worked on for 10 years. Assuming he means sidebar tabs because LLMs didn't exist 10 years ago, yeah, they've done the work to allow for extensions to provide sidebar tabs. You install Tree-Style Tabs or similar and you have sidebar tabs.
But it is pretty obvious that it is not the point here, or isn't it? The fact that Mozilla is putting work into AI instead of I don't know rewriting more of the Firefox backend in rust, which was the initial purpose of the language, is offensive. The Mozilla/Firefox VPN is offensive, because it is shit (was shit when I tried it). Sneaking in advertisement IDs into Firefox which are enabled by default is offensive. Having a for profit branch of Mozilla is offensive.
These are all from memory, and probably not accurate, the point still stands, Mozilla puts stupid shit into Firefox nobody wants or needs, instead of developing it along user needs.
Firefox is the last bastion of independent browser development. miss me with $obscure_browser_project, because they have no market share, cannot be used by my granny and are often using components of different browsers.
This is all we got, the rest is chromium based and is developed by a advertisement company.
I just want them to not add stupid shit. It costs money, manpower, and my nerves. None of them are available in abundance.
“Why is company wasting time on X feature I don’t like instead of Y feature I like”
- people who’ve never worked on large projects developed by many people before
They can work on multiple things in parallel, and putting more people on project Y doesn’t always mean project Y gets done faster. Also some people do like AI tools and it’s certainly popular right now. Most people have never programmed before and don’t know what Rust is or why it would benefit them to have their browser written in Rust.
It’s one thing to be disappointed by a company a business decision you do not agree with, but to be offended by it seems a little much; especially when said decisions aren’t offensive to begin with (i.e., there is no political/religious/sexual/social ties).
I see two possible solutions (there may be more):
- Open a respectful discussion with one or more of the core developers to see if they can shed some light on the decisions made.
- Become a contributor to the project and make pull requests for the changes you want to see implemented. Of course, talk to the developers first so you don’t waste your time on a contribution they don’t want.
Keep in mind that neither of those options guarantee that you’ll get what you want. Developers do not owe users for decisions they (or higher ups) make on a project. Also, they are not required to accept outside contributions if it goes against their roadmap.
I was very confused by this tweet because I have no idea what chatbot he's talking about, or what side tabs he's talking about.
I am generally against putting AI in everything not because I think AI is necessarily a fad or anything, I simply don't need 400 different iterations of the same technology
For what it's worth, I don't want tabs or AI in the sidebar. And I don't want a sidebar
Instructions unclear, now you get two sidebars one for each side, another bar at the bottom, all filled with chatbots so you can chatbot while you chatbot. There's a fee for each one though. Shit isn't free.
We used to joke in 2010s: what is Internet Explorer? It's a program that is used to download a browser.
Nowadays, what is Mozilla Firefox? It's a repository you fork to make a browser.
But they're also working on sidebar tabs. It's out in nightly already
Don't get me wrong, I think what Mozilla did is absolutely stupid. But unless it's spying on you as you browse or whatever, how is this a problem? From what I see here in Developer Edition, it just iframes the chat window and docks it in a sidebar. It's just bloat for people who don't use it, or turn it off, and an upgrade for people who will use it.
My only problem with it is that this kind of stuff should be an add-on.
I haven't looked into the chatbot thingy at all yet, but if it meets basic quality standards (local LLM, not too large in size, actually helpful), then personally, I do actually think that it should be included by default, because it'll primarily help out the kind of users who don't know to install add-ons.
Like, people had the same complaint with the translation feature they included, and I'm just seeing my dad who doesn't speak English, who would never hear of such an add-on, where this just opens up a big chunk of the web to him.
Its functionality to integrate with whatever LLM you use - local or SAAS. I can't say I'm excited about the feature, but I think it's also a bit silly that people are angry about it (though I take the point about development priority).
It's healthy for Firefox's market share to keep feature parity with Edge and other browsers that have the same function but with a manufacturer-pushed service.
It is spying on you. https://make-firefox-private-again.com/
about:config
dom.private-attribution.submission.enabled
set to false
