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With Community Help, Chrome Could Support Side Tabs Extension
jones_supa writes The lack of a vertical tab strip (or "Tree Style Tab" as the Firefox extension is called) has been under a lot of discussion under Chrome/Chromium bug tracker. Some years ago, vertical tabs existed as an experimental feature enabled with a "secret" command line parameter, but that feature was eventually removed from the browser. Since then, Google has been rather quiet about whether such feature is still on the roadmap. Now, a Google engineer casts some light on the issue. He says that a tree-style interface for tabs would be overly complex as a native implementation, but Google would back the idea of improving the extensions interface to support a sidebar-like surface to render the tab UI on, if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
None of their products work well with them.
Meanwhile, Firefox takes away the choice for users to have tabs on bottom (below the menu bar and bookmark bar) , like many want. Since Mozilla now has SUCH a desire to be EXACTLY like Chrome, it should be no surprise they would remove user choice, and even add an annoying and identical menu button on the right.
Thankfully, for now, you can get sane behavior back with the "Classic Theme Restorer" add-on. Yet again, Add-on's save the day and show off one of Firefox's main strengths. Back to Chrome- who knows, maybe they will start adding user choice?
Considering how important browsers are to a user's computer experience, I fail to understand why Chrome is so hostile to customization and why Mozilla is following that same path now. Let users put things where they want them (at least without artificial limits), and don't take away existing customization options!
You mean I could be a unpaid Google employee? Where can I sign up?
My favorite feature of Firefox is load background tabs on demand, its a shame other browsers do not have this. I can start up Firefox with 200 tabs from the previous session and it starts up nice and quick, with other browsers if I did this I could go make a pot of coffee and it browser would still be loading when I came back.
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I see a company stepped up to do it. Google decided it wasn't what they wanted to spend their time on, but they were willing to accept it if someone else found it useful enough to do do it. Benjamin said his company will do it, so it should happen.
https://code.google.com/p/chro...
Seriously, it's better.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Tree-style browser tabs are a neat idea. It's not very often where I'm searching for a piece of information and end up with more browser tabs than I can keep track of, but I could see how this would be a very useful feature.
It is too bad that the Firefox project has been derailed by "developers" more interested in "contributing" UI changes than actual bug fixes to the point where I'm no longer willing to use it, or I'd go fire up Firefox and check out the tree-style tab plugin.
if someone from the open source community would step forward to do the work to drive the feature to completion.
Google/Chromium paid devs can then take all the credit. One sided deal if you ask me.
I have a different idea: how about Schmidt putting slightly more pocket change into his browser team instead?
Er, I've had this solution (at least as a UI) in extension form: https://chrome.google.com/webs...
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http://mentalfloss.ca - Free music that doesn't suck
After using Tree Style Tab (combined with Tab Mix Plus) for over three years now I can't imagine going back to tabs-on-top on a widescreen monitor *shudders*.
Never mind the better use of real estate, the hierarchichal nature of the tabs (the "tree" in the name) is just brilliant.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No the actual post says that it doesn't meet a cost-benefit analysis. Complexity is an aside.
A correct summary would read
I just defected to Pale Moon two month ago.
Absolutely brilliant. Firefox as it used to be. Configurable like it was in the good old days, with that Australis interface ripped out. (And even returned to a sane version numbering scheme lately).
TreeStyle Tab works for vertical tabs (in contrast to SeaMonkey, where it doesnt), and with "Firefox 3 Theme for Firefox 4++ Reloaded" it works, looks and behaves exactly as the Firefox did in its best days. I finally feel "at home" again on the Internet without being irked by unexpected UI surprises all the time.
IE 11 you hit up or down arrow keys. Smooth as butter like a phone. Firefox mostly as smooth as its XP hooks limits hardware acceleration.
CHROME? Blip blip blip tear in image when you hit up and down. Slashdoters on Windows reading this try it? Surprised?
First Chrome had it. Then you had to go into about::flags. Now it is not even available? WTF. IE 8 in 2009 had this and Firefox in 2011. I can't even use it anymore as it feels like I am on an old computer. I hope someone from Google is reading this.
Last blink is not standard compliant. Font face, animations, and other things are not done like W3C. I have to write one site for W3C compliant browsers and one conditions for blinks way of doing things. It reminds me of IE of old
http://saveie6.com/
There once was a browser which supported this out-of-the-box several years ago.
RIP, Presto-Opera
Amazing! Even now, modern browsers are still catching up with features Opera had a decade ago!
(The real Opera, not this travesty that is Chrome wearing its corpse like a second skin)
I used the side tab in chrome before it was dropped. As soon as it was dropped I deleted chrome from my system. Every PC I setup for anyone has Firefox with side tabs. I can have over 50 tabs open and it's the only sensible way to navigate on a 16:9 screen. There is a forum that discusses this, and the engineer who dropped it says very few used it. Well duh: you had to execute obscure commands to even enable it. Side tabs should be the default mode for any browser.
46137
How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks? You do tag them right? Firefox's tagging facility has been able to do this for awhile, but then how does that reduce the sheer quantity, to something user-friendly? There's a decent but semi-broken extension for this also, called Tag Sieve. There's also been a feature request made to build it into FireFox native, and I hope the original developer gets the job. In the meantime, having read the user-comments, I've made the extension work, and it is wonderful. Highly recommended.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-...
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/s...
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
That's just a different side. How about tabs in the middle?
well the mac app-menu-at-top-of-screen is just stupid if there's multiple apps in view at a time...
Why? You cannot physically perform actions on more than one app at a single time. The menu is active for the one you are presently using as indicated by where you have clicked the mouse pointer. It's not the only way to do things (or even necessarily the best) but it's perfectly sensible and logical and consistent.
What annoys me about the mac interface is that choosing the close window button on the window frame doesn't actually close the app if there are no windows left open. I have to either close the app from the pull down menu (two clicks) or use a keyboard shortcut. I have never once wanted to close all the windows of an app and still leave the app running. It' just not an interface choice I truly grok.
How do you folks deal with thousands of bookmarks?
If you "need" to deal with thousands of bookmarks you are Doing It Wrong. Help me out here because I honestly cannot even imagine a (sane) use case or work flow where I would actually need (much less want) to deal with that many bookmarks.
I won't be happy until there are tabs on EVERY side at once. And nested as well. How is Chrome supposed to be CUA compatible on OS/2 otherwise?
No, I'm not doing it wrong. For example, I see tech-notes and answers all the time on stackoverflow.com, so I bookmark and tag them for future reference, so I CAN forget about them. Other forums too, since I am a developer. These add up and can overwhelm quickly otherwise, and become un-useable. Tag Sieve plus the native tools for sorting bookmarks in FireFox make my clippings very manageable and useful.
FWIW, Scrapbook is a FireFox extension that saves selected HTML from a web page to my local disk. These local pages can be re-ordered, or prioritized even. This is very useful when I'm concerned the page's content might disappear in the future. A useful research tool!
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
There's already a Chrome extension like that, it's called "Tabs Outliner". It's a bit quirky but it works! Too bad it can't be docked to the main window though...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl
For more than 3 pages tabs are a pain. I use my own browser (webkit) with a drop down list.
Yo dawg, I heard a company bookmarked the entire internet for you. Its called Google I think.
There is no wrong use-case for bookmarks.
Bookmarks are there for interesting things. Age of interest doesn't (shouldn't) come in to it. (starting to sound creepy)
I have bookmarks of interesting sites from years ago. Articles. (here included)
Small websites, old community sites.
Or how about social networking profiles. You never know when Facebook might delete your profile just for existing. Poof, there goes your contact lists.
I even use my bookmarks to store non-URL information. Emails. Addresses. Never know when Google will axe you for real-name policy bullshit they always say isn't an issue now.
I'd store notes too, but that is just too much hassle and won't work nicely at all. Easier to just use a separate document for that. HTML document at that. Guaranteed to work everywhere and for many years, unlike the newest hit file format from Microsoft or the open source community alike! (Sometimes, dinosaurs are good.)
Why the hell are people so up in arms about Mozilla not doing what they don't have the resources to do, and making us do them as addons? Clearly there are a lot of bugs with the native UI, and if Mozilla can't fix them quickly enough and people keep leaving for Chrome, then why should they be forced to do everything for us?
Seriously, this attitude is rotten to the core. I understand that it's easier and less frustrating to have someone else do the work for you, but Firefox isn't Microsoft or Google - they don't have their resources. If even Google won't do it, then wake up and smell the coffee. The community has to step up and help out, not bitch and moan that Mozilla isn't doing everything for them.
"Oh, but this should be a native feature!" is a non-argument. Everyone has a different line for what should be a native feature. Mozilla just doesn't have the time to do a billion little things like this while still maintaining and upgrading the core of Firefox. It's not like an addon will be slower; the UI is still made of the same components, you're just tweaking some CSS or what-not.
"Oh, but extensions break all that time!" is an equally stupid argument. Of course they do! Mozilla can't be expected to maintain 100% backwards-compatibility while changing the guts of Firefox, nor to bloat up their browser any more edge and corner cases just for our most inane convenience. Someone has to step up and do the work, and maintain that work. If Mozilla says they can't do it, then we should do it, not be drama queens.
No, I'm not doing it wrong. For example, I see tech-notes and answers all the time on stackoverflow.com, so I bookmark and tag them for future reference, so I CAN forget about them.
I don't know. Reference is one thing, but it seems like it'd be more useful to, you know, actually learn the material rather than trying to track down which of your thousands of bookmarks has the answer you're looking for.
A hierarchical side tab is badly needed because right now Chrome on the desktop sucks. Badly. Like really bad.
+1 for "Classic Theme Restorer"
I stopped using Chrome the *second* time it just stopped working correctly, because an extension I depended upon got "updated" and thus no longer worked. I can't stand having to figure out why things aren't working correctly anymore when I haven't changed anything. As long as it's impossible to lock down the software until *I* want to update it, I'll just opt out of Chrome.
Because no one offers a "personal search pool" yet and those bookmarked locations were non-trivial to find - many of them were not found with the first round and a lot of keyword adjusting to discover (more and more keyword adjusting, as google continues to "simplify" search...). For those of us living far from the bay area, each round of searching takes a non-trivial amount of time.
Although I agree with a lot of what you said, the issue is that the code was already there to put the tabs on bottom. They removed it for no good reason except to enforce their vision of looking exactly like Chrome. First the changes to the URL bar, then the style, then the addition of the menu button, and now removal of tab location choice. It is a sucky thing to do. If we wanted Chrome, we would use Chrome.
If they want to remove crap and bloat and simplify the base browser (like it is SUPPOSED to be, that was the GOAL of Firefox), then made the damn "developer tools" an add-on. 99.9% of Firefox users have absolutely no need for them, so why is all that long and extremely complex code part of the native browser- making it complicated, and taking up lots of space?
They removed it because they were updating their UI code and don't have the workforce necessary to maintain all of these UI options. I know that it's fun to pretend they're just assholes, and that they're just cloning Chrome's UI, and that they're the Devil, but honestly: tabs on the bottom is FAR less important than other things they're working on. Stop being babies. The new UI framework makes it easier to maintain such features, so if Mozilla doesn't want to maintain it themselves anymore, then you should be able to add the feature back yourself. Too hard for the Slashdot crowd? Or are all of our petty little frills so important that we want Mozilla to let the core of the browser continue rotting away instead? Developer tools are far more important than having tabs below your damn addressbar, as they let you actually figure out how to do things like place the stupid tabs under the stupid address bar. But only if you want to do something instead of cry and whine.
Tired of updating every few days for guaranteed regressions.
Don't need the SJW crap.
Fuck Firefox.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Yeah, you are doing it wrong. Bookmarks are supposed to be used for URLs that you want to permanently store in the browser. If you're only trying to store an address temporarily, something like To-Read Sites extension is what you should be using.
FWIW, Scrapbook is a FireFox extension that saves selected HTML from a web page to my local disk.
You act like that's some big deal. Chrome can save entire pages too. Opera and IE can save entire pages into a single MHT file.
Mozilla has more money than Opera does and Opera doesn't have any problems making a non-broken browser. Don't even make me bring in other browsers like Midori, which still works better than Firefox.
If Mozilla were so hard up for cash, as you wrongly claim, then maybe they should ditch that fancy, *CUSTOM-BUILT* silicon valley building of theirs and move into a warehouse in Oakland.
If Mozilla wants to hold on to their userbase, they need to be competitive and lose the sense of entitlement.
I regularly have anywhere between 1,000-5,000 tabs open in my browser, as I load vast numbers of web pages daily and click on links to be loaded for offline viewing. The day the dumb fucking assholes at Google decided to remove the vertical tab feature is the day I ditched Chrome forever. Firefox is likewise a piece of shit, but I can at least see what tabs are open and switch from one to another in between occasional crashes. Most days I wish someone would gather up most programmers responsible for the WWW (as well as Lennart Pottering, just because), boil them slowly in a vat of acid, then put the video on Youtube.