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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.
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!
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...
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 use Tab Snooze for that in Chromium. It works much better than Firefox's solution because it frees up all of the RAM used by the tabs until they are needed.
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
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.