1mo ago

You can already use vertical tabs, by the way.

www.geekersdigest.com Vertical tabs are here in Firefox (and how to switch back) - Geeker's Digest

After a recent Firefox update, a sidebar shows up and allows vertical browser tabs. How this looks and how to revert to horizontal tabs.

I know this is old news by now, but I was not sure how to activate vertical tabs on all of my browsers. It certainly is not obvious, so I wanted to include the instructions here in case anyone else wants to try it out.

Type about:config into the address bar of Firefox. You'll be greeted with a warning that you are accessing advanced settings - click "Accept the Risk and Continue." Search for the boolean preference sidebar.verticalTabs and set to true. That's it! Enjoy your vertical Tabs!

Edit: You may also need to set sidebar.revamp to true if it is not already/automatically set.

43 comments

I like it better than the horizontal tabs, but it's still got nothing on the Tree Style Tabs extension. With that you can group tabs together, collapse trees, close trees, etc. Makes it much easier to keep things organized

Wow, I had no idea this was already built in! Thank you!
I wonder why this feature is "Obscured" like this, maybe it's still in beta?
- Yeah, pretty sure, it hasn't been officially announced yet, because it is still under development.

They take too much screen space, and my muscle memory is built on horizontal tabs, 2500 of them
- They take up the mostly-unused horizontal screen space, though, whereas the vertical space that it frees up is far more precious to me. And I get to see most of the tab titles as a bonus!
- On my 1080p display it's taking up too much space, but on an ultrawide it's perfect use of the additional real estate.
  
  I usually keep it in the "icon" view which is pretty space efficient. When you activate the vertical tabs, it also generates a toggle at the top of the window that lets you expand the tabs. I find it is better on smaller screens than the standard horizontal tabs personally.
  
  I have four 40" cheap 4k tvs, I split them in roughly 6 sections
- I used some css tweak to display a Sidebery on mouseover. But after the latest Firefox update it broke.

Nice, wheres my tab groups?
- There is still no built-in solution for nested/tree-like groups, but for creating simple groups Ctrl+N has served me for many years.
  
  Ctrl n is just new tab isn't it? Honesty in the browser tab grouping isn't as critical to me. On my phone where I open too many tabs it would be nice to group them so my random ADHD lookups are grouped together.

You damn degenerate vertical tab lovers

There's an additional option I have set to true, and not sure what else it provides, but it's: sidebar.revamp
- Thanks! I added it to the post.

I personally prefer Sidebery, but glad they're finally putting this feature in as a standard feature
- Sideberry is good, but you end up with tabs in both places. This option allows you to reclaim the vertical space without need for messing with the chrome css stuff.

For anyone interested, Firefox-based browser Floorp (terrible name) has had tab groups and vertical tabs for a while now.
I've been using it for a while now and it's nice and stable.
- I'm fancy of the 'Zen' fork. However I just can't get myself to switch off of Firefox for some reason. Idk why, it just works™️ for me
- I did use it for a while, but it lags in updates and is missing a feature or two that I needed.
  Overall it's great and underrated (or under-represented).

They really should have a browser that can have side by side sites so I don't have to keep doing that in the OS. Maybe I should just invent one. I don't know about anyone else but almost all of my workflows at this point are one side reference material and the other side what I'm working on.
- There is a very good addon that does this. Tiles WE It toggles splitting your browser in 2/3/4/6 windows tiled, or custom layouts. Also fancyzone and altsnap are great tiling manager https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tile-tabs-we/
  Also what is this https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/tiled-tab-groups/
  
  I'll have to give that a look, thanks.
- Zen browser, a Firefox fork trying to imitate Arc (chromium).
- Opera can do this, but it's chromium
- There's the Side View extension, perhaps?

Nice! I’ve been running the nightly for this, looking forward to switching back to regular Firefox.

Also available on LibreWolf with a toggle at about:config.
- Helpful to know! I assume it's the same or similar?
  
  It’s a fork of Firefox that enhances privacy/security.

Oh neat!!

I can but strangely enough not using them is apparently something I can't do, as FF refuses to hide the vertical bar.
- Check the link. It includes instructions for disabling it.
  
  Thanks.