1683375 - Sidebar tabs in Compact mode

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1894060

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

When in Compact mode, we should move the tabs to the side to give more vertical space for the browser content area.

Comment 1

[BelFox]

• Maybe a keyboard shortcut could be useful to switch to vertical tabs? E.g. press "F11" for full screen, and "Ctrl+F11" for compact mode.
• Will this allow developers of "vertical tab" add-ons to remove/hide the horizontal tab strip as well?

Comment 2

[MrOtherGuy]

Honestly I don't think it makes sense to link compact mode to vertical-tabs for several reasons:

1. Vertical-tabs feels very different to use than usual horizontal tab-strip.
2. Vertical-tabs mostly benefits folks who have lots of tabs - with only few tabs there will be lots of wasted space in the vertical tabs area.
3. People who use normal density might very well want vertical-tabs as well without having to switch to compact density.
4. Vertical-tabs is potentially worse for non-maximized window mode (I'll give a reason below)
5. I think lots of people use compact mode for stylistic reasons, not necessarily because it takes less space. Obvious example is the rounded back-button, and less obvious one is that compact mode looks more "neat" because of the proportions of icons & text vs toolbar height.

In non-maximized-windows vertical tabs is not so great. Imagine that you have browser taking half of your screen and the other half is for IM-client and lets say devtools. A 1000 x 1000 window for browser is perfectly usable and wider content would be annoying to read anyway. But, if I would have vertical tabs there, then I would need to make the window wider to compensate for decreased content width. And that would obviously take away usable space from my other windows.

So, if it vertical-tabs were linked to compact mode, then I would be forced to use non-compact mode which would be pretty annoying. I can totally see why some folks would want that if they only ever use their browser in maximized mode though. Another point is I wonder how this could ever work properly for people who have their monitors in vertical orientation - then even maximized windows wouldn't have enough usable width.

I do think that implementing vertical tabs is indeed a good and very welcome addition - the community would no doubt welcome the option. But it is so different to normal horizontal tabs that it should be a separate toggle all by itself and not linked to any other preference.

Comment 3

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

I agree we shouldn't conflate vertical tabs with compact mode.

Comment 4

[A Shevchuk]

To consume less space, vertical tabs could be made collapsible when out of focus, like this: https://youtu.be/bonasv2q98U
Using this for a few years with different vertical tabs addons with no issues.

Comment 5

[Danny Colin [:sdk]]

In non-maximized-windows vertical tabs is not so great. Imagine that you have browser taking half of your screen and the other half is for IM-client and lets say devtools.

Most of the time, I have two windows side-by-side and I default wouldn't want a sidebar to eat all the spaces.

However, I think having a builtin fonctionality for vertical tabs as an option would makes a lot of sense. For one, it could helps a lot to make Firefox more usable on small screen (<= 10 inches) like the Pinephone, Librem 5 or any android tablet where you can boot a full Linux distro. Also, I'm sure users who prefer the default theme would also like this feature without having a compact interface.

To consume less space, vertical tabs could be made collapsible when out of focus

Sure, it helps but you lose the tab title excerpt/preview you get with the tabbar.

Comment 6

[Stephan Sokolow]

As someone who has more or less resigned himself to using Tree Style Tab just as a way to be able to see tab titles while using the built-in tab bar to avoid bugs, I'd definitely appreciate built-in sidebar tabs as long as they keep the sidebar panel's support for adjusting the width to avoid triggering sites' mobile layouts... but I wouldn't want it to be tied to compact mode.

I already use compact mode everywhere and wouldn't want my continued use of it to be contingent on losing the freedom to experiment with alternative configurations or have a sidebar tabs extension for more features with tabs on top as a backup for when bugs surface.

It's bad enough that I have to amend Compact mode with some userChrome.css because some developer thought it'd be a good idea to WONTFIX things like making the sidebar header font size match the rest of the UI like one would expect in a native application sidebar header.

Comment 7

[Will]

Attachment: vertical tabs with URL.png

Very excited about this but I have a request to UX: please consider showing the URL as well as the title. Firefox for Android does this on the tab view screen, Chrome for Android also had this option for years. And Chrome for Desktop recently decided to borrow Firefox's "List all tabs" button except they show the URL as well. This is a meaningful improvement because often the URL is just as informative as the title of a website, and often even more so! Showing both (without having to hover your cursor) means users will be able to identify tabs faster and with more confidence.

Comment 8

[Stephan Sokolow]

(In reply to Will from comment #7)

Created attachment 9198790 [details]
vertical tabs with URL.png

Very excited about this but I have a request to UX: please consider showing the URL as well as the title. Firefox for Android does this on the tab view screen, Chrome for Android also had this option for years. And Chrome for Desktop recently decided to borrow Firefox's "List all tabs" button except they show the URL as well. This is a meaningful improvement because often the URL is just as informative as the title of a website, and often even more so! Showing both (without having to hover your cursor) means users will be able to identify tabs faster and with more confidence.

I have to disagree. I want what I remember once being possible using only XUL CSS, where you literally take the tab bodies as they are now (an icon, followed by an ellipsized title, on a single line, in the OS-specified default widget font size) and run them down the left side of the window.

If a URL is added, it runs counter to the spirit of compact mode (another reason to make sidebar tabs and compact mode independent settings) and I'll break out the browser toolbox and userChrome.css to get rid of it if I must.

Comment 9

[Will]

But it seems UX has already decided that it is wrong to conflate vertical tabs with compact density. And I do think it should be optional, there are users that won't want the URL there. But as I said above, there are valid reasons for showing the URL as well as the title, that's why you see it in Firefox for Android, Chrome for Desktop "tab search" list and Chrome for Android as well (in testing). I personally think it's crazy to not show the URL as well as the title, the URL is extremely important, relevant information. I've always thought the title is not enough but so many UI/UX people these days like to oversimplify and have very minimalist UI's :(

Comment 10

[Stephan Sokolow]

(In reply to Will from comment #9)

I've always thought the title is not enough but so many UI/UX people these days like to oversimplify and have very minimalist UI's :(

That's true, but from the perspective of "so many UI/UX people these days like to reduce the density of useful information in the name of minimalism" (my perspective), you want to contribute to the problem by adding something I almost never need (immediate, direct access to the URL) while halving the number of tabs that fit within scroll pane's viewport in the process.

Taken from that "You want to halve how many tabs can fit on screen!?" perspective, I think you can see where I'm coming from.

Comment 11

[Danny Colin [:sdk]]

Friendly reminder that Bugzilla isn't a forum or a chat. Please consider using Discourse or our Matrix server where we have a #proton:mozilla.org room.

Comment 12

[Will]

Sorry. Should I break out comment #7 into its own feature request bug or is it fine here?

Comment 13

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

Edge offers this as a separate feature. I do think we should consider doing something similar, but independently from compact mode which this bug was filed for.

Comment 14

[Graham Perrin]

(In reply to jastekken from comment #2)

… and other comments, including:

(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #13)

… something similar, but independently from compact mode which this bug was filed for.

Maybe:

• reopen bug 262826 for vertical tabs
• but not bug 218280 for Free positioning of the tab bar (vertical / bottom tabs) – because realistically, I don't envisage freedom extending to an option of bottom tabs

– and then this bug 1683375 can become specific to auto-switching from the top, to the side, in compact mode, as a user preference (not a default).

Comment 15

[Nour]

I would like to see this become an option, similar to Edge: Vertical/sidebar tabs with the ability to hide the title bar.

Looks neat overall and reminds me of the GNOME file explorer (with its search bar at the top and sidebar of tabs). This would also work really well with window tiling as it uses less vertical space.

Comment 16

[Danny Colin [:sdk]]

I open(In reply to Dão Gottwald [::dao] from comment #13)

Edge offers this as a separate feature. I do think we should consider doing something similar, but independently from compact mode which this bug was filed for.

I agree. I opened a separated issue (See bug 1698376).