218280 - Free positioning of the tab bar (vertical / bottom tabs)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement)

Description

[martin f. krafft]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030831 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.5a) Gecko/20030831 Mozilla Firebird/0.6.1

I want the tabbar on the right hand side, but I apparently can only put it at
the top or the bottom (even with tabextensions). Would it be possible to allow
that? The coolest would be to have it off-draggable so that it would be its own
window if dragged out of the Firebird Window.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.

Comment 1

[Pham]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 150379 ***

Comment 2

[martin f. krafft]

I looked at the bug you referenced and I read it all. It talks about making it a
toolbar, which wouldn't even solve this problem. I can't take a toolbar and make
it appear down the right or left-hand side of the browser window. That's mainly
what I want. The other features would be nice...

Don't kill me, I am reopening this bug.

Comment 3

[Jesse Ruderman]

See also bug 104566, same bug for Seamonkey.

Comment 4

[Jason Bassford]

I'll confirm this as new (for Firebird).  I checked open and closed bugs
relating to tabs and couldn't come up with a duplicate.

(I do find it ironic, however, that this is filed under "Toolbars" when my bug
150379, to make the tab bar into a toolbar proper, was WONTFIXED.)

Comment 5

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 229795 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Jesse Ruderman]

*** Bug 234302 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 7

[José Jeria]

*** Bug 234538 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 8

[Ryan Polk (Quark)]

*** Bug 262826 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 9

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

*** Bug 266365 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 304448 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 11

[Peter van der Woude [:Peter6]]

*** Bug 317067 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 12

[Dave Townsend [:mossop]]

*** Bug 332526 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 13

[Fox2]

Relates to tabbar more than "toolbars in general". Change component?

Reasons for request:

Heavy tabbed browser users, fixed width tabs, tabbar overflow handling, are an important roadmap issue, eg see http://wiki.mozilla.org/Tabbed_Browsing/User_Interface_Design

A working vertical tabbar capability should be seen in that context, it's a valuable way to use firefox tabbed browsing. I can't speak for others, but for me its a critical usability feature, available in Opera, and if not supported I would probably not find an alternative browser easily usable. Right now I'm using a prefs.js "hack" from Mozilla. But since vertical tabbar is almost at the point of "could nearly be working" now, it makes sense to get it working the rest of the way.

Vertical tabbar capability can be hacked into Firefox and is used. It just doesn't work quite properly right now, it has a few issues that horizontal tabbar doesn't, mostly because it's not properly integrated. If it were, then likely other extensions would better support it too. I feel that in view of its usefulness, it should be a tabbar option and not just rely upon what Simon Bünzli (probably accurately) calls a "hack".

Simon Bünzli suggests that the JS in the Wiki mostly works due to the Mozilla community, and that this should therefore be filed as an enhancement request. If so, it's a serious one, because for heavy tab users, vertical tabbar can be a very valuable device for efficient browsing, presenting the Firefox user with the maximum number of tabs in one row/column.

Comment 14

[Steve England [:stevee]]

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Move_the_tabbar_(Firefox) for a workaround.

Comment 15

[Fox2]

(In reply to comment #14)
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Move_the_tabbar_(Firefox) for a workaround.

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=332298 for issues on that workaround which brought me to this page. The workaround is so close to working, but doesn't :-/ 

It's exactly that line of workaround which ended up with adding my request to this entry instead.

Comment 16

[RNicoletto]

(In reply to comment #14)
> http://kb.mozillazine.org/Move_the_tabbar_(Firefox) for a workaround.

That link is here no more, the correct one is http://kb.mozillazine.org/Move_the_tabbar_%28Firefox%29

However, the article ending states: "Note that this does not work for Firefox 2.0b2 and newer."

I'm using Firefox with vertical tab bar since 2008 (thanks to "VertTabbar" and "Tree Style Tabs" extensions) and this greatly improves the browser usability on my laptops (16:9 or 16:10 monitor). 

Unfortunately, right now there is only one extension that supports vertical tab placement on Firefox 3.6.x: Tree Style Tab.

I hope that Mozilla UI Team will find the time to fix this bug before Firefox 4.0 release.

Comment 19

[u310142]

I wonder if this will ever make it into firefox as this bug has been created almost 7 years ago. :/

Comment 20

[José Jeria]

(In reply to comment #19)
> I wonder if this will ever make it into firefox as this bug has been created
> almost 7 years ago. :/

Well, only because there is a bug that requires a feature does not necessarily mean that it will be added to Firefox.

Comment 21

[Peter Lairo]

How to handle the likely and very common case where users have only one or a few tabs open? There would be a lot of "unused" space below the few open tabs...

+-----------------------------------------------+
| < > (H) (B) [ www.mozilla.org     ] [ Search ]|
|         +-------------------------------------+
|[ Tab 1 =| Hello world                         |
|[ Tab 2 ]|                                     |
|         |                                     |
|         |                                     |
|    ?    |                                     |
|         |                                     |
|         |                                     |
+-----------------------------------------------+

Would that look awkward/wasteful?

Comment 22

[u310142]

I like this idea:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/images/no_tabs_firefox.jpg

but instead of "no tabs", you have tabs integrated with that sidebar.

Comment 23

[kulmegil]

It definitely should be a part of basic Firefox/Fennec feauture set.

It would make all theme authors add support for vertical tabs removing the burden from user to manually fix favorite style with Stylish or userchrome.css

Not only would make all "make vertical tabs" extensions unnecessary but also, more importantly, give all those "tree style", "tab groups", ect extensions some ground base to build on (instead of reinventing the wheel).

Comment 25

[[Baboo]]

A Firefox bug that depends on a SeaMonkey bug?

Comment 26

[:Gavin Sharp [email: [e-mail]]]

Not something that we're going to support in Firefox by default.

Comment 28

[kulmegil]

Still won't fix, that's just sad.

Comment 29

[Graham Perrin]

See also … bug 1683375 comment 14.

Comment 30

[Graham Perrin]

… also bug 1698376 – Add vertical tabs mode