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Comment by ninetax | Hacker News Reader

Firefox user here. There are so many great plugins I would love to use chrome for, but one singular thing keeps me using Firefox: side tabs.

Not even tree style, just a plain and simple side tab list. I'm a tab addict and I can't live without opening a dozen every session. Then i keep them open for weeks like a todo list.

Does anyone know if it's possible to write a chrome plugin that can integrate right into the side of the chrome window?

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I researched it briefly, at that time it was not possible.

There are lots of attempts to be "good enough" at tab management to make surviving without tree tabs possible. Some of them come close, most don't. At the end of the day, I changed my workflow to work with Chrome, rather than vice-versa because I found Chrome's responsiveness more valuable than Firefox's plugins.

Yes, firefox tabs are definitely way better. I am a tab addict too - right now I have open 20 of them, and that's only because it's night and I'm not working and done most of my daily reading and closed the extra ones. Usually it'd easily be 30+ of them. Firefox allows to manage them much better. I still use Chrome though because FF memory management is still - even with recent improvements gets out of hand pretty quickly (matter of days with my - admittedly heavy - usage). But their tab system is one thing which always tempts me to switch. It is way ahead of what Chrome can do.

I need my trees. But yes, side over top is such a vast improvement.

Hell, I remember when tabbed browsing was all new and stuff. Thanks, Opera (though I never actually used you).

Did Opera really bring us tabs first?

I remember using NetCaptor (an IE shell browser) long before Opera had tabs.

Maybe Opera popularized it first?

I encountered them on a 'Nix browser, Skipstone (gtk toolkit browser, probably using Gecko) back in 2000. What I heard was that Opera had pioneered the feature. At the time, browsers were one window per page, which ... pretty much completely sucked.

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