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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.

3 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. Tabs on side?? How about tabs on BOTTOM. by markdavis · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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!

  2. Typical abuse of unpaid opensource devs. by danknight48 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Typical abuse of unpaid opensource devs. by thegarbz · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sounds more like "if you want it do it yourself" via extensions.

      That seems like a perfectly reasonable approach for something a company doesn't want to focus on.