389115 - Wish: Improve tab browser into a vertical bar with tree structure

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Mats Ahlgren]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.4
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061023 SUSE/2.0.0.4-1.1 Firefox/2.0.0.4

May I humble put forth this suggestion:

That a >> menu at the end of the tabbar, or making tabs overflow to the next line, is not the right solution because 1) in the browser, vertical space is at a premium 2) the >> can be very annoying to those with low-resolution monitors and who use more than 5-ish tabs at a time, in which case tabs become secretly obscured (confusing for new users).

The proper solution I feel is demonstrated in the debian package mozilla-tabextensions, where you have a vertical sidebar where you have a *tree* of tabs. Not only does this let you see the *full text of all your tabs* without chopping it off (50 tabs visible with perfect clarity), but also lets you see your "train of through" (or "train of browsing") in tree form.

Sketch (overall):
- The tabbar is a resizeable vertical pane, NOT in the sidebar.
- Each line in the pane houses a tab (favicon + title) -- no background necessary
- If overflow happens, then overlay a very large and visible marker on the bottom or top with a non-solid color (unlike >>, which can be hidden depending on color scheme).

Sketch (tree structure):
- When a new tab is opened not-from-a-webpage (e.g. from the search bar, or url bar, etc.), it gets added to level0 (the leftmost level) at the bottom.
- When a new tab is opened from-a-webpage, it gets added as a child of the opening webpage, with indentation approximately equal to the size of the favicon.
- If a tab is deleted by closing, close it and all of its descendents.
- If you right-click on the tab, you are given the option of killing only that tab -- i.e. killing it and grafting all the child sub-trees onto the parent of the killed tab
- There is an additional shortcut, something like ctrl-shift-pgup/pgdw, which tabs you to the next/previous sibling of your current tab, if one exists. If none exist, nothing happens.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Mats Ahlgren]

For users who find this bug report and vote for it, currently there is a handy extension called Vertigo which does something similar to this, but unfortunately without the tree stuff I talked about, and without memorizing its width (you have to resize it when you reopen windows). It may also require tweaking your userChrome.css; see the discussions on its associated discussion pages.

Comment 2

[Marc]

Please implement soon.

Vertical Tabs is very limited
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vertical-tabs/

Tree Style Tab is very buggy
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/