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Comment by mi100hael | Hacker News Reader

With Firefox, you get the best of both worlds. You get favicons, but you also get a minimum tab width so you can always read the first word or two of the page title. Rather than squishing down infinitely like Chrome, they just quickly scroll side-to-side more like Safari.

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Side-scrolling tabs are one of the worst UI innovations I've suffered in recent years. They wreak havoc on spatial tab organization, make it impossible to see how many tabs are open, and slide out from under the mouse cursor unpredictably when clicking.

The original Safari behavior of a vertical overflow list of tabs, favicons included, keyboard searchable and navigable, was much more usable. https://i.stack.imgur.com/eyXum.png

Strongly disagree. That list menu made it hard to reorganize tabs, required a mouse click, and arbitrarily split your tabs into those visible and those relegated to some obnoxious menu.

Every one of those downsides was addressable without flushing the baby. Sessions (https://sessions-extension.github.io/Sessions/) provides a keyboard-controllable vertical tab popover with draggable tabs from all open windows.

Spatial tab organization is already lost any time you open or close a tab.

It really isn't, human brains are clever enough to deal with that quite well.

And they're not clever enough to deal with Safari's tab bar?

Just as humans can adapt to the tab bar shifting when tabs are opened and closed, humans can also adapt to the concept the tab bar focusing on the left or the right and collapsing the opposite side.

The point of my previous comment is you've lost literal spatial organization already, as the exact same position isn't guaranteed to be the same tab after other tabs have opened/closed, so we're already talking about dealing with relative positioning of tabs instead of absolute positioning. And Safari's tab bar does not screw with relative positioning.

It gives you less clear landmarks though. Spatial navigation through 20 items with no differentiation isn't easy. Even if you know "9 items from the right", you can't do easily do that subconsciously. "The tab next to the Stack Overflow one" or "The third Stack Overflow tab" is a lot easier in comparison. At least for me, navigating a lot of sites without favicons or large amounts with the same one decreases efficiency a lot, for exactly this reason.

This particular thread isn't about favicons at all. It's about Safari's side-scrolling (once you have enough) tab bar.

Then I misunderstood your original comment (which I took to mean spacial navigation doesn't work, scrolling or no scrolling), my mistake.

If your tabs scroll in Firefox, there’s a dropdown at the right which lists all tabs. I find this decidedly superior to the overflow behaviour you describe.

I'm not seeing any differences between the two.

Just another reason why Firefox is king.

Another killer feature for me is that you can basically middle click anything and open it in a new tab, whether a bookmark, back button, etc. Makes some tasks very intuitive and trying to maintain the same workflow on Chrome is extremely frustrating. I cannot understand for the life of me why this isn't a native feature in Chrome.

Middle click works the same way in Chrome

You can even middle-click-and-hold the back button, bringing up the tab history so you can go back to a page several steps back in a new tab!

Doesn't work for me on GNU/Linux. I checked a Windows VM and it works from there. My browsing mainly occurs in Linux so this is still an issue.

Humm, it worked for me in a VM running Ubuntu.

With Firefox you can go one better and install the TabMixPlus extension and get multi-row tabs. I don't know how anyone functions with Chrome or Safari -- any reasonable number of tabs is unusable to me.

Enjoy it while it lasts—as of Firefox 57 (November) such functionality will be dead in the water. The sidebar panel is able to be used for things like vertical tabs, but there’s nothing which would allow the browser tab bar to wrap onto multiple lines (and I don’t expect it to ever happen).

(I run Nightly and have successfully migrated all my extensions to WebExtensions alternatives with only very minor loss or change of functionality.)

Yeah that will probably end my use of Firefox or I'll just "never" upgrade.

I’ve been a Firefox user since 0.93, with a year or so in the middle when I was forced to use Chrome as my primary browser because I was needing to run it from a USB drive and Firefox was just too slow from a USB drive. (I could switch back with Firefox 4.)

There are really good reasons for the move to WebExtensions, technical, for security and for performance. I was intensely sceptical of the timeline initially announced, but as a Nightly user I can report that November is actually sounding very reasonable now.

Not upgrading your browser leaves you insecure, and within a year or two websites will start breaking on you. In little things of design, mostly, but steadily more and more. Oh, and you’ll miss out on the continuing performance improvements of the Quantum project.

(Also, what would you migrate to? Even without XUL addons, Firefox is still going to be better for what you want than all the mainstream alternatives.)

I obviously understand all that but you have to understand is that I've been browsing with this feature for over a decade. It's fundamental to how I use browser -- even now I have over 40 tabs open and they're all nicely visible.

I've tried to use Chrome for the performance and stability but the lack of multi-row tabs always kept me on Firefox. It's just such an amazing piece of usability.

Imagine if Microsoft just removed the ability to copy/paste in the next version of Windows. Despite the improved performance and security of each successive version of Windows -- would you be so quick to upgrade?

> Not upgrading your browser leaves you insecure, and within a year or two websites will start breaking on you. In little things of design, mostly, but steadily more and more.

This blackmailing is the worst, and what I hate about modern software.

I wonder when, if ever, vertical tabs will become the norm, or even a well-supported option.

They seem to resolve most tab issues while also being a better use of space in many use cases.

switched on firefox and can't look back!

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