How does it compare to sidebery? I use the vertical tabs on that and quite like it but only found them because of another feature, per container socks5 (one for local ip and a few to strategically placed cheap vps to override my network default mullvad vpn tunneling as needed)
Yeah vertical tabs with tab groups have replaced Sidebery's hierarchy and panels for me. Mostly because it feels slightly smoother and more performant as a built-in feature.
Sidebery is awesome but afaik it doesn't seem that it syncs the state of your tabs across browsers. TabStash is not as visually polished but it achieves that capability by using Firefox bookmarks for the tabs and groups.
I've been using the Vertical tabs with Sideberry for a bit. The minified vertical tabs greatly declutters the top of the browser and feels pretty good, but I've got a lot of trees in Sideberry and several panels for organization structure that the built-in vertical tabs can't yet do, so for now most of my navigation is still Sideberry. Tab Groups are something to watch that may help some of what I use multiple panels for in Sideberry. I think native "tree-structure" is a lot more of what I'd particularly want, though.
Not a fan of vertical tabs as truncated titles hurts my fov aesthetics. These days I will just pin the tab when I want to go back to it later but even that has it's limits too.
After a certain number of open tabs, the titles are less truncated with vertical tabs than horizontal tabs. You also have more of the titles in your center view if you have the text distributed in a more rectangular shape than a technically-also-rectangular-but-much-more-elongated shape.
I recently switched to Sidebery for this. Guess I'll have to do a comparison. I really enjoy Sidebery though, It has made my workflow at work much more organized.
It's so much better than any of the extension-based XUL interface hacks. As soon as they can figure out when to auto-expand the sidebar it will be perfect.
Yes, because the APIs aren't perfectly fleshed-out. And they may never be, and yet that's still completely OK because the WebExtension model is obviously better along the performance, security, portability, and API stability axes.
This is blatantly false, and one of the most dishonest and manipulative claims that I've seen on HN.
Performance is performance. If one technology is more performant by removing features, useful or not, it it factually faster, and that performance absolutely does count. Features are completely irrelevant to performance measurements of a system.
If you have two cars, car A with top speed 160 MPH and a 0-60 of 3s, and car be with top speech 120 MPH and a 0-60 of 5s, some people may still prefer car B because it has better mileage or nicer features or is cheaper (which is the overall value judgement that you seem to be extremely confused about), but precisely zero sane people will tell you that car A "isn't clearly better from a speed standpoint" because it has less features than car B.
Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite.
Aside from crippling ad blockers, are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions, or is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact?
> Crippling my ad blocker doesn't make my browser faster on average, even though dishonest benchmarks from advertising companies may claim otherwise. Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite.
OK, so now you're moving the goalposts, continuing to dishonestly redefine words, and cherry-picking specific instances of addons that support your point, while ignoring the fact that I soundly refuted your utterly insane previous argument.
> Aside from crippling ad blockers
No? WebExtensions clearly did not "cripple" ad blockers by any stretch of the imagination. Maybe you're conflating WebExtensions and Manifest v3?
> Removing XUL also didn't make TreeStyleTab faster; quite the opposite.
Cherry-picking items to try to support your point only proves that you don't have robust evidence to support it in general. This is the hasty generalizations fallacy. As someone who lived through the WebExtensions transition, I didn't perceive any slowdown in any of my dozen or so extensions.
> are there any other theoretical performance improvements enabled by WebExtensions
Yes - if you had any knowledge at all of the old addon model, you'd know that the old XUL-based addons prevented Firefox's move to the multi-process Electrolysis architecture, which significantly improved performance.
> is it all about reducing opportunities for badly-written extensions to have an impact
Yes, that is (on top of everything else) a performance benefit. Humans are not robots - all humans write bad and buggy code, and the XUL model not only made it much easier to write buggy and slow code, but the lack of a well-defined interface resulted in ossification that massively inhibited Mozilla's ability to develop Firefox.Even if it didn't, making changes that help/force the lower 99% of programmers to write better code while mildly inhibiting the ability of the top 1% of of programmers is absolutely worth it, and in practice has massively improved performance.
If you tried to run old Firefox on a modern CPU with a bunch of extensions, you'd very clearly see the performance difference due to the ability to actually take full advantage of more than one core, and due to the improvements that Mozilla was able to make by deprecating the old API.
Perhaps stop commenting unless you can stop committing numerous fallacies, making utterly insane statements, pretending that human factors don't exist, and making statements about things that you have no understanding of.
Firefox moved to multi-process before moving to WebExtensions. You've lost count of how many mass extinctions the Firefox extension has been through, but there were XUL extensions that were updated to be compatible with multi-process, and then later had to be totally rewritten with completely new UIs when XUL was killed. And the usability hit that extensions like AdBlock Plus and NoScript suffered was crippling, even if it wasn't quite as bad as MV3, and NoScript lost features that went beyond just UI.
> Firefox moved to multi-process before moving to WebExtensions.
And? Removal of XUL addons were still a prerequisite for the multi-process architecture. Mozilla just realized that WebExtensions was a sane, performant extension API that worked well with e10s, and would useful for compatibility with Chrome.
> You've lost count of how many mass extinctions the Firefox extension has been through
Two? Hardly a lot.
The XUL model is inferior to the Web Extensions model. No amount of trying to cherry-pick specific instances of extensions that had local functionality or performance losses will detract from the facts that (1) the XUL addon system was inferior and (2) had to be removed in order to make Firefox (both the browser and ecosystem as a whole) more performant, secure, stable, and easier to maintain.
I tried using vertical tabs and tab groups simultaneously, but there seems to be nothing like 'list all tabs' / Recent tab groups, so my tab groups are already lost amongst the other tabs. 'close duplicate tabs' is also missing from vertical tabs.
Since I keep having to go into that menu I just disabled vertical tabs.
Exactly, since the 'list all tabs' is a superset of vertical tab behavior, and I have to go there anyhow for things missing in vertical tabs, I disabled vertical tabs.
Been using vertical tabs to avoid floating toolbar gymnastics while sharing screen on Microsoft Teams. It’s been working great and now I don’t miss the horizontal tabs.
odd. There's one nitpick I have where you can't move a tab group (you gotta move other tabs around it), but it otherwise is everything I wanted. It even "just works" with no issue alongside tab containers, letting you mix in groups from different containers into one group.
I upgraded mine to FF 138. After the update it even opened the tab groups blog post. 15 minutes of going through settings later, no, my browser has no tab groups feature at all. Of course then I see it's a progressive rollout. Sad.
There is an about:config setting you can turn on. I don’t have it hear but it has been widely posted so take a look. I think if you search about:config for “tab” it might show up.
Great job Mozilla.
I was already using the awesome “Simple Tab Groups” extension for this but will look into switching.