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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question.

I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development environment. Great browser, a lot of great UI ideas out of that shop.

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Much to my surprise, you can still download and use OmniWeb.

https://www.omnigroup.com/more

I only tried it on a few websites but it worked remarkably well.

The per-site settings feature was so easy to use; it also had "workspaces" so you could group tabs and open them all at once.

I paid for that browser and I still would.

OmniWeb was great! I think Opera still did it first, though.

I moved on to Safari after it died, but I missed vertical tabs dearly and still do. Hopefully this idea catches on well enough for the Safari team to finally steal it.

Opera was the Xerox PARC of web browsers in a lot of ways.

Except that you could actually use it instead of being a legendary project we only heard about but very few people actually used. That makes it all the more painful that it was taken away.

Yes, I remember Opera having it around that same time, and Firefox having a plugin to copy it. I think the Firefox plugin had full "tab tree" support though. I believe it died after one of the many updates that changed how plugins worked, although I haven't checked in a couple of decades to see if something similar has appeared.

You can still have tab tree in Firefox using Tree Style Tab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...)

Same here. I loved OW and its Tab layout. But after its demise I went to Safari.

Vertical tabs are already a thing in Safari with tabgroups although it doesn’t completely remove the horizontal tabs

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