Good WRT vertical tabs. Ever since widescreens debuted, that's been the best way to make use of the excess horizontal space...moving the to the titlebar was always one of my least favorite design...
Good WRT vertical tabs. Ever since widescreens debuted, that's been the best way to make use of the excess horizontal space...moving the to the titlebar was always one of my least favorite design decisions that browsers (and everyone else) went all-in on. Glad I won't need an addon anymore.
I guess the thing that always makes me go back to tabs in the title bar is that it's not like I get that real estate back or anything, the title bar is still gonna be there either way. Might as...
I guess the thing that always makes me go back to tabs in the title bar is that it's not like I get that real estate back or anything, the title bar is still gonna be there either way. Might as well use it.
It's not always though, especially on linux. Using windows feels so icky now because nothing has a consitent UI. The browser is my greatest outlier with KDE.
It's not always though, especially on linux. Using windows feels so icky now because nothing has a consitent UI. The browser is my greatest outlier with KDE.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm opening myself up to a dozen "but have you tried this distro" comments, but I didn't really enjoy my couple of excursions into daily driving linux. I'm just used to windows and...
Yeah, I'm sure I'm opening myself up to a dozen "but have you tried this distro" comments, but I didn't really enjoy my couple of excursions into daily driving linux. I'm just used to windows and I'm a lot less likely to run into some random thing that causes me to spend two hours googling for a solution. Not saying it never happens, but usually if something goes wrong in windows I can figure it out pretty quickly, but it always felt like a lot more friction on linux. All that to say, I was thinking more from the perspective of Firefox on windows.
I think you're not wrong, and basically anyone who argues with you has some serious blinders when it comes to Linux, and thats coming from someone who uses Linux every day. There are some caveats...
I think you're not wrong, and basically anyone who argues with you has some serious blinders when it comes to Linux, and thats coming from someone who uses Linux every day.
There are some caveats there though. Once you get a system to a state that you like, stop messing with stuff, and stick to a normal (for you) usage pattern, the number of annoying issues goes down dramatically. Secondly, when something breaks in Linux, I can always, always fix it myself as long as I'm willing to angrily bash against it for long enough. Windows breakages are way more rare, but in the case of serious ones, I'm often fumbling in the dark reading unhelpful posts from "Microsoft Experts" on Microsoft's support site (seriously, who even are these people? Do Microsoft pay them? If that's the case why are they so god awful at their jobs?) And about fifty percent of the time I'm just stuck. No one knows why my issue happened. There are no further troubleshooting steps. That's it. End of the road. Either wipe your drive and reinstall windows or buy a new computer.
It's such a unique feeling of frustration and helplessness that I just really detest. Even though it's way less frequent than annoying Linux problems, man I'd do a lot to avoid that feeling ever again.
Won't lie to you, to get to this state of comfort wit the system (KDE for me too) may have taken me up to two years of daily usage. But I was using windows for about fifteen years before that, so...
Won't lie to you, to get to this state of comfort wit the system (KDE for me too) may have taken me up to two years of daily usage. But I was using windows for about fifteen years before that, so that should not be surprising. But the best part of this hard process was that I was fighting rough edges of the system or - even more - my lack of understanding and experience instead of a corporation that is actually adversarial towards me, using all kinds of dark patterns against me.
Much as it has been under GNOME on Linux, it’s been a common pattern for Mac apps to combine titlebars+toolbars for a long time too. A handful of Mac devs were dabbling with the idea as early as...
Much as it has been under GNOME on Linux, it’s been a common pattern for Mac apps to combine titlebars+toolbars for a long time too. A handful of Mac devs were dabbling with the idea as early as the late 2000s, but it spread like wildfire after Apple started doing it in their apps around 2010.
I don’t particularly mind this bit of design so long as some open space is left on the toolbar-titlebar to drag the window around with, and it’s not cutting out proper menus (not a problem on macOS with its global menubar, but is a major proliferator of those infernal hamburger menus under GNOME).
It's not redundant - the point of the titlebar is that it's grabbable with the mouse to move the window around. Putting tabs in the titlebar means the only section you can mouse-drag the window...
It's not redundant - the point of the titlebar is that it's grabbable with the mouse to move the window around. Putting tabs in the titlebar means the only section you can mouse-drag the window with is this tiny section between the rightmost tab and the minimize button (or the X button in the GNOME version).
I should have clarified that it is redundant for my workflow. I primarily use macOS which allows moving the window by clicking and holding on any free space to the left or right of the tabs in the...
I should have clarified that it is redundant for my workflow. I primarily use macOS which allows moving the window by clicking and holding on any free space to the left or right of the tabs in the top bar. You can also use the free space to the left or right of the address bar in the toolbar. I haven't used a Linux distro in ages and can't speak to moving Firefox by dragging in the free space of the toolbar.
I almost exclusively full screen my windows making it very rare I manually drag a window to move it. If you're working this way or using a tiling window manager, then you're really not losing anything by collapsing the tabs into the title bar.
What puddleofkittens is saying is that the title bar allows you to do this with just the mouse, and not a combination of mouse and keyboard that the super button requires
What puddleofkittens is saying is that the title bar allows you to do this with just the mouse, and not a combination of mouse and keyboard that the super button requires
I know the super button is on my keyboard. I said it's not on my mouse, which I'm already using to drag the window around. There's no reason to make this a two-handed affair.
I know the super button is on my keyboard. I said it's not on my mouse, which I'm already using to drag the window around. There's no reason to make this a two-handed affair.
OK, cool. I didn't know you knew what the super key was. Just trying to be helpful. I guess the question then is whether some extra vertical screen space is more useful than having to use two...
OK, cool. I didn't know you knew what the super key was. Just trying to be helpful.
I guess the question then is whether some extra vertical screen space is more useful than having to use two hands to move a window. Personally I'm almost always using two hands to operate my computer, I don't need to move windows often and I'm quite limited on vertical pixels. I'm definitely happy losing a mostly empty title bar. Obviously everyone's requirements are different though.
Tab grouping is nice, definitely the one thing I missed from Chrome. I tried for a very long time to get used to their Tab Containers, which are in some ways even better than groups (it's very...
Tab grouping is nice, definitely the one thing I missed from Chrome. I tried for a very long time to get used to their Tab Containers, which are in some ways even better than groups (it's very nifty being able to simultaneously have my personal and business gmaill in separate tabs open. Or have a dedicated container for stuff like Amazon to minimize tracking). But the UX for how to actually navigate about them is very poor, and updates over the past 2 years hasn't really addressed that.
I hope that isn't completely abandoned (on the contrary, they may be leveraging it for the profile management, hopefully). Tab grouping UX + tab container utility would be the best of both worlds.
God I hope they don’t abandon it. I use tab containers for security/privacy reasons - keeping Facebook in its own jail etc. The UX of it isn’t so important to me (the centre of the universe)
God I hope they don’t abandon it. I use tab containers for security/privacy reasons - keeping Facebook in its own jail etc. The UX of it isn’t so important to me (the centre of the universe)
Just be aware that containers aren't entirely isolated if you use extensions. In fact, containers and extensions are a bit of a mess as far as data isolation goes. For starters, extension settings...
Just be aware that containers aren't entirely isolated if you use extensions. In fact, containers and extensions are a bit of a mess as far as data isolation goes. For starters, extension settings are always global. But if a extension uses a background page (very likely) there is risk of other data bleeding through.
It very much does depend on the extension itself, but it is a very tricky thing to solve. I am no longer really involved with the extension but with moderator toolbox for reddit it still isn't working properly as it is such a pain to properly do.
By default chrome has a similar issue with incognito context. But Chrome at the very least supports a flag called split that effectively forces two background pages isolating things properly.
In the context of containers this probably only impacts a very small group of users. Expanding the context to incognito browsing the impact is a bit bigger. Apparently not big enough for anyone at Mozilla to give this a high priority even though the potential privacy impact from my perspective can be quite high.
I generally am rooting for Firefox to succeed and remain around as a viable alternative. But, the way the focus does seem to be on visible changes does still annoy me. They brought browser extensions to a level of "good enough to be largely compatible with chrome", left a bunch of issues like these to rot. Which I get to some degree, Mozilla has limited resources and as I said a lot of these issues are some edge cases only a few extension developers run into. But, in the meanwhile, I do see them actively implement new extension API calls that are not compatible with chrome. Things that likely take up much more resources for very little gain as well (as the majority of devs will go for cross browser compatible functionality).
To be fair, it is still miles ahead of the bullshit Apple went through with Safari so it certainly could be worse. I still wish things were slightly better though.
The UX isn't that bad the way I use it, namely just making sure to set every domain I want to isolate to always open in that container. I do wish it was slightly easier to launch a new tab in a...
The UX isn't that bad the way I use it, namely just making sure to set every domain I want to isolate to always open in that container. I do wish it was slightly easier to launch a new tab in a certain container, namely from the 'new tab' page.
I guess it helps that I mostly use it to cluster 'like' services together..IE if it requires a Google login or putting all the banking in an isolated Banking container.
As much as I adore the idea of a native integration, they may as well just fork and and embed Sidebery into their browser directly. Knowing how their XML layout is, it's certainly not going to be...
As much as I adore the idea of a native integration, they may as well just fork and and embed Sidebery into their browser directly. Knowing how their XML layout is, it's certainly not going to be as great as TST or Sidebery.
So... they learned nothing from the MDN debacle, then? I realize this isn't precisely the same issue, being that it isn't being applied to a technical documentation site, but this still smells...
local AI
So... they learned nothing from the MDN debacle, then? I realize this isn't precisely the same issue, being that it isn't being applied to a technical documentation site, but this still smells absolutely rank to me.
Firefox's "local translation feature" (which is AI powered) is very useful to me, and I think the automatic alt-text feature will be too. "AI" is an extremely heterogeneous technology with a range...
Firefox's "local translation feature" (which is AI powered) is very useful to me, and I think the automatic alt-text feature will be too.
"AI" is an extremely heterogeneous technology with a range of applications and in some contexts it works much better than in others. I wish people didn't have such a visceral reaction to it (in either direction)!
The usage they mention here, using it to generate alt text for images, seems more than fine to me. Lets some users access content they wouldn't be able to otherwise, and I don't think it will lead...
The usage they mention here, using it to generate alt text for images, seems more than fine to me. Lets some users access content they wouldn't be able to otherwise, and I don't think it will lead to miscomprehension nearly as much as all the summary generators would. If it's truly entirely local and doesn't kill performance, I'm for it.
Although I would want to know what that model's trained on.
Lets see if they offer a way to hide horizontal tabs while vertical ones are in use. Another thing that I would like to see from them is a new way to manage bookmarks. The web is now very...
Lets see if they offer a way to hide horizontal tabs while vertical ones are in use.
Another thing that I would like to see from them is a new way to manage bookmarks. The web is now very different from when bookmarks were created and I think that what we have right now is not a good UI for bookmarks. Finding stuff in the future depends too much on your discipline when bookmarking is done. Right now I use tab stash, which uses bookmarks in order to offer tab management and I think that it is a clever idea because you end up doing some of the organizational work while you are still using the tabs.
It’s really interesting that bookmarks have remained essentially unchanged for the past 20 years. They’re a core web browser feature but they’ve gotten practically no development. There’s the, “if...
It’s really interesting that bookmarks have remained essentially unchanged for the past 20 years. They’re a core web browser feature but they’ve gotten practically no development. There’s the, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it argument” but as you’ve pointed out I don’t think that applies here.
Across browsers bookmarks are clunky to navigate and manage, which I think is a major driver of tab hoarding — there’s considerably less friction in leaving tabs open until you need them and then closing them when finished than there is in bookmarking things and then remembering to delete them when they’re no longer needed.
Personally the only time I bookmark sites is when I’m certain that it’s something I’ll repeatedly need in the future (meaning they don’t need to be deleted) because otherwise cleanup becomes an ordeal.
Your second paragraph really addresses the central issue and why I think that maybe bookmarks and tab management could be tackled together, like Tab Stach does. Maybe they could improve this idea...
Your second paragraph really addresses the central issue and why I think that maybe bookmarks and tab management could be tackled together, like Tab Stach does. Maybe they could improve this idea and offer an improved UI on top of it, with automatic tag suggestion or something.
My assumptions: bookmarks have become less useful for the majority of people because traffic on the internet has consolidated into a few websites, some with their own system of bookmarks. Youtube...
My assumptions: bookmarks have become less useful for the majority of people because traffic on the internet has consolidated into a few websites, some with their own system of bookmarks. Youtube has "watch later" and other playlists, Reddit has saving, etc. There has also been a rise in people that have dozens of tabs open at all times and have browsers set to open old tabs when launched. So it would be that bookmarks aren't a feature many people are using all that much or would like to see improved.
Very nice, profiles and native vertical tabs are probably my biggest sticking points with the browser. Need to see exactly what they have planned for AI to say if I’ll like it, but hopefully...
Very nice, profiles and native vertical tabs are probably my biggest sticking points with the browser. Need to see exactly what they have planned for AI to say if I’ll like it, but hopefully whatever it is can be turned off regardless. Increased customization is cool but honestly I’d be just as happy with a toggle that makes the browser match my OS.
Interested to see what this looks like. I currently use Sideberry in Firefox and I absolutely love it. Ability to not only group tabs but even add a higher level of grouping in the vertical panel....
Interested to see what this looks like. I currently use Sideberry in Firefox and I absolutely love it.
Ability to not only group tabs but even add a higher level of grouping in the vertical panel. Right click menu lets me unload tabs, so even though I have a good amount open, they don't use memory/resources. Integrates with container tabs, so certain sites can always load in a specific container and show up in a specific panel. (I do this with LinkedIn as its own, because LinkedIn is super creepy/invasive.)
It's good to see them improving on Firefox. I'm intrigued by the profile management the most because I have some hope that this will indirectly fix my problem with the browser, which I had to deal...
It's good to see them improving on Firefox. I'm intrigued by the profile management the most because I have some hope that this will indirectly fix my problem with the browser, which I had to deal with again last week.
I'm glad to hear both of those and the recent improved performance of Firefox; even installed it again to test. However, I ain't sure I'll be switching back to main Firefox since Floorp already...
I'm glad to hear both of those and the recent improved performance of Firefox; even installed it again to test. However, I ain't sure I'll be switching back to main Firefox since Floorp already has some of these features like vertical tab [and better tree-style tab integration].
The AI stuff seems to be the new meme of the day. I wonder whether this will be feature everyone lets go of in the future. I've barely used it though.
I haven’t dabbled much, but every time I’ve looked at AI in the browser, it’s almost always a lite version or otherwise require money. Just my own personal preference, but there’s nothing a...
I haven’t dabbled much, but every time I’ve looked at AI in the browser, it’s almost always a lite version or otherwise require money. Just my own personal preference, but there’s nothing a browser AI can offer at the moment that can justify me paying for access to it.
Many AI services cost money because they use hosted models from OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini. This feature however runs a local model in the browser, completely on your device. It's an accessibility...
Many AI services cost money because they use hosted models from OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini. This feature however runs a local model in the browser, completely on your device. It's an accessibility tool, so it seems unlikely to cost money.
They're probably using an adaption of LLaVA, Phi-3-vision, or some other vision model for describing images.
As NPUs become more available, and AI features are further developed and optimized, I expect to see more locally-hosted options becoming available.
I actually have vertical tabs already thanks to an addin and some file modification to get rid of the horizontal tabs. That said hoping this makes it smoother
I actually have vertical tabs already thanks to an addin and some file modification to get rid of the horizontal tabs.
I've been using Tree Style Tabs for basically as long as it's been around. It's always been a pain to get rid of the standard horizontal tabs - it's one of those things that you have to "hack" the...
I've been using Tree Style Tabs for basically as long as it's been around. It's always been a pain to get rid of the standard horizontal tabs - it's one of those things that you have to "hack" the browser to get done.
My fear is that their implementation won't be as nice and it will be just as hard to get rid of the new tabs as it is to get rid of the current tabs.
It would be nice if they added APIs to allow addons to fully replace native vertical tabs with their own. Seems like it should be easy to implement with how vertical tab addons use the existing...
It would be nice if they added APIs to allow addons to fully replace native vertical tabs with their own. Seems like it should be easy to implement with how vertical tab addons use the existing sidebar APIs.
Vertical tabs was one of the major things that drove me to Vivaldi. I'll likely still continue to use it for other reasons (love all of the shortcuts and such), but it's nice to see another option...
Vertical tabs was one of the major things that drove me to Vivaldi. I'll likely still continue to use it for other reasons (love all of the shortcuts and such), but it's nice to see another option that has this.
I have been bouncing between Vivaldi and Firefox for a couple years now and the gestures native to Vivaldi are the thing that keeps tickling the back of my mind when using Firefox. I'm super into...
I have been bouncing between Vivaldi and Firefox for a couple years now and the gestures native to Vivaldi are the thing that keeps tickling the back of my mind when using Firefox. I'm super into the addition of tab grouping and (even though I don't use it) vertical tabs but bring me gestures!
Been a while since I tried Vivaldi but I'm totally with you on the usefulness of gestures. I've been using Firefox with the Foxy Gestures extension for as long as I can remember and honestly any...
the gestures native to Vivaldi are the thing that keeps tickling the back of my mind when using Firefox
Been a while since I tried Vivaldi but I'm totally with you on the usefulness of gestures. I've been using Firefox with the Foxy Gestures extension for as long as I can remember and honestly any other browser, file explorer, or other such ui feels sluggish in comparison. Every time I use another computer or browser for whatever reason, I instinctively try to use a gesture before realizing "oh...".
If the "ai" stays offline and can be disabled then fine. Except the reported performance improvements this seems like nothing that would bring fundamental improvements instead of nice-to-have but...
If the "ai" stays offline and can be disabled then fine. Except the reported performance improvements this seems like nothing that would bring fundamental improvements instead of nice-to-have but could have been worked around.
I use Firefox and I advocate for using Firefox but that is only because of things such as arkenfox and because the alternatives are orders of magnitude worse. It would be nice if instead of nice to haves they instead tried to be the browser that actually goes against the flow and respects the user and the agency of the user without requiring a high amount of effort but fine.
Good WRT vertical tabs. Ever since widescreens debuted, that's been the best way to make use of the excess horizontal space...moving the to the titlebar was always one of my least favorite design decisions that browsers (and everyone else) went all-in on. Glad I won't need an addon anymore.
I guess the thing that always makes me go back to tabs in the title bar is that it's not like I get that real estate back or anything, the title bar is still gonna be there either way. Might as well use it.
It's not always though, especially on linux. Using windows feels so icky now because nothing has a consitent UI. The browser is my greatest outlier with KDE.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm opening myself up to a dozen "but have you tried this distro" comments, but I didn't really enjoy my couple of excursions into daily driving linux. I'm just used to windows and I'm a lot less likely to run into some random thing that causes me to spend two hours googling for a solution. Not saying it never happens, but usually if something goes wrong in windows I can figure it out pretty quickly, but it always felt like a lot more friction on linux. All that to say, I was thinking more from the perspective of Firefox on windows.
I think you're not wrong, and basically anyone who argues with you has some serious blinders when it comes to Linux, and thats coming from someone who uses Linux every day.
There are some caveats there though. Once you get a system to a state that you like, stop messing with stuff, and stick to a normal (for you) usage pattern, the number of annoying issues goes down dramatically. Secondly, when something breaks in Linux, I can always, always fix it myself as long as I'm willing to angrily bash against it for long enough. Windows breakages are way more rare, but in the case of serious ones, I'm often fumbling in the dark reading unhelpful posts from "Microsoft Experts" on Microsoft's support site (seriously, who even are these people? Do Microsoft pay them? If that's the case why are they so god awful at their jobs?) And about fifty percent of the time I'm just stuck. No one knows why my issue happened. There are no further troubleshooting steps. That's it. End of the road. Either wipe your drive and reinstall windows or buy a new computer.
It's such a unique feeling of frustration and helplessness that I just really detest. Even though it's way less frequent than annoying Linux problems, man I'd do a lot to avoid that feeling ever again.
Won't lie to you, to get to this state of comfort wit the system (KDE for me too) may have taken me up to two years of daily usage. But I was using windows for about fifteen years before that, so that should not be surprising. But the best part of this hard process was that I was fighting rough edges of the system or - even more - my lack of understanding and experience instead of a corporation that is actually adversarial towards me, using all kinds of dark patterns against me.
Much as it has been under GNOME on Linux, it’s been a common pattern for Mac apps to combine titlebars+toolbars for a long time too. A handful of Mac devs were dabbling with the idea as early as the late 2000s, but it spread like wildfire after Apple started doing it in their apps around 2010.
I don’t particularly mind this bit of design so long as some open space is left on the toolbar-titlebar to drag the window around with, and it’s not cutting out proper menus (not a problem on macOS with its global menubar, but is a major proliferator of those infernal hamburger menus under GNOME).
I use vertical tabs and remove the title bar via a
userChrome.cssfile since it's a redundant view.It's not redundant - the point of the titlebar is that it's grabbable with the mouse to move the window around. Putting tabs in the titlebar means the only section you can mouse-drag the window with is this tiny section between the rightmost tab and the minimize button (or the X button in the GNOME version).
I should have clarified that it is redundant for my workflow. I primarily use macOS which allows moving the window by clicking and holding on any free space to the left or right of the tabs in the top bar. You can also use the free space to the left or right of the address bar in the toolbar. I haven't used a Linux distro in ages and can't speak to moving Firefox by dragging in the free space of the toolbar.
I almost exclusively full screen my windows making it very rare I manually drag a window to move it. If you're working this way or using a tiling window manager, then you're really not losing anything by collapsing the tabs into the title bar.
In GNOME you can super-click anywhere on a window to move it.
(Not to be outdone...) KDE as well.
Same in Xfce.
My mouse doesn't have a Super button. You can close the window with alt-F4 (or such), but nobody considers the X button redundant.
The super button is on your keyboard. It has a picture of a sort of wobbly looking window on it. 😁
What puddleofkittens is saying is that the title bar allows you to do this with just the mouse, and not a combination of mouse and keyboard that the super button requires
I know the super button is on my keyboard. I said it's not on my mouse, which I'm already using to drag the window around. There's no reason to make this a two-handed affair.
OK, cool. I didn't know you knew what the super key was. Just trying to be helpful.
I guess the question then is whether some extra vertical screen space is more useful than having to use two hands to move a window. Personally I'm almost always using two hands to operate my computer, I don't need to move windows often and I'm quite limited on vertical pixels. I'm definitely happy losing a mostly empty title bar. Obviously everyone's requirements are different though.
Tab grouping is nice, definitely the one thing I missed from Chrome. I tried for a very long time to get used to their Tab Containers, which are in some ways even better than groups (it's very nifty being able to simultaneously have my personal and business gmaill in separate tabs open. Or have a dedicated container for stuff like Amazon to minimize tracking). But the UX for how to actually navigate about them is very poor, and updates over the past 2 years hasn't really addressed that.
I hope that isn't completely abandoned (on the contrary, they may be leveraging it for the profile management, hopefully). Tab grouping UX + tab container utility would be the best of both worlds.
God I hope they don’t abandon it. I use tab containers for security/privacy reasons - keeping Facebook in its own jail etc. The UX of it isn’t so important to me (the centre of the universe)
Just be aware that containers aren't entirely isolated if you use extensions. In fact, containers and extensions are a bit of a mess as far as data isolation goes. For starters, extension settings are always global. But if a extension uses a background page (very likely) there is risk of other data bleeding through.
It very much does depend on the extension itself, but it is a very tricky thing to solve. I am no longer really involved with the extension but with moderator toolbox for reddit it still isn't working properly as it is such a pain to properly do.
By default chrome has a similar issue with incognito context. But Chrome at the very least supports a flag called
splitthat effectively forces two background pages isolating things properly.Firefox does not support split and also does not plan to support it citing scaling issues. While some progress has been made on the matter it has been really slow considering the first issue I linked is now 7 years old.
In the context of containers this probably only impacts a very small group of users. Expanding the context to incognito browsing the impact is a bit bigger. Apparently not big enough for anyone at Mozilla to give this a high priority even though the potential privacy impact from my perspective can be quite high.
I generally am rooting for Firefox to succeed and remain around as a viable alternative. But, the way the focus does seem to be on visible changes does still annoy me. They brought browser extensions to a level of "good enough to be largely compatible with chrome", left a bunch of issues like these to rot. Which I get to some degree, Mozilla has limited resources and as I said a lot of these issues are some edge cases only a few extension developers run into. But, in the meanwhile, I do see them actively implement new extension API calls that are not compatible with chrome. Things that likely take up much more resources for very little gain as well (as the majority of devs will go for cross browser compatible functionality).
To be fair, it is still miles ahead of the bullshit Apple went through with Safari so it certainly could be worse. I still wish things were slightly better though.
The UX isn't that bad the way I use it, namely just making sure to set every domain I want to isolate to always open in that container. I do wish it was slightly easier to launch a new tab in a certain container, namely from the 'new tab' page.
I guess it helps that I mostly use it to cluster 'like' services together..IE if it requires a Google login or putting all the banking in an isolated Banking container.
As much as I adore the idea of a native integration, they may as well just fork and and embed Sidebery into their browser directly. Knowing how their XML layout is, it's certainly not going to be as great as TST or Sidebery.
I even have a (semi-popular) repo to add vertical tabs into Firefox called FirefoxSidebar, that I have been using and tinkering on since ~2019 or so.
So... they learned nothing from the MDN debacle, then? I realize this isn't precisely the same issue, being that it isn't being applied to a technical documentation site, but this still smells absolutely rank to me.
Firefox's "local translation feature" (which is AI powered) is very useful to me, and I think the automatic alt-text feature will be too.
"AI" is an extremely heterogeneous technology with a range of applications and in some contexts it works much better than in others. I wish people didn't have such a visceral reaction to it (in either direction)!
The usage they mention here, using it to generate alt text for images, seems more than fine to me. Lets some users access content they wouldn't be able to otherwise, and I don't think it will lead to miscomprehension nearly as much as all the summary generators would. If it's truly entirely local and doesn't kill performance, I'm for it.
Although I would want to know what that model's trained on.
Lets see if they offer a way to hide horizontal tabs while vertical ones are in use.
Another thing that I would like to see from them is a new way to manage bookmarks. The web is now very different from when bookmarks were created and I think that what we have right now is not a good UI for bookmarks. Finding stuff in the future depends too much on your discipline when bookmarking is done. Right now I use tab stash, which uses bookmarks in order to offer tab management and I think that it is a clever idea because you end up doing some of the organizational work while you are still using the tabs.
It’s really interesting that bookmarks have remained essentially unchanged for the past 20 years. They’re a core web browser feature but they’ve gotten practically no development. There’s the, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it argument” but as you’ve pointed out I don’t think that applies here.
Across browsers bookmarks are clunky to navigate and manage, which I think is a major driver of tab hoarding — there’s considerably less friction in leaving tabs open until you need them and then closing them when finished than there is in bookmarking things and then remembering to delete them when they’re no longer needed.
Personally the only time I bookmark sites is when I’m certain that it’s something I’ll repeatedly need in the future (meaning they don’t need to be deleted) because otherwise cleanup becomes an ordeal.
Your second paragraph really addresses the central issue and why I think that maybe bookmarks and tab management could be tackled together, like Tab Stach does. Maybe they could improve this idea and offer an improved UI on top of it, with automatic tag suggestion or something.
My assumptions: bookmarks have become less useful for the majority of people because traffic on the internet has consolidated into a few websites, some with their own system of bookmarks. Youtube has "watch later" and other playlists, Reddit has saving, etc. There has also been a rise in people that have dozens of tabs open at all times and have browsers set to open old tabs when launched. So it would be that bookmarks aren't a feature many people are using all that much or would like to see improved.
Very nice, profiles and native vertical tabs are probably my biggest sticking points with the browser. Need to see exactly what they have planned for AI to say if I’ll like it, but hopefully whatever it is can be turned off regardless. Increased customization is cool but honestly I’d be just as happy with a toggle that makes the browser match my OS.
Interested to see what this looks like. I currently use Sideberry in Firefox and I absolutely love it.
Ability to not only group tabs but even add a higher level of grouping in the vertical panel. Right click menu lets me unload tabs, so even though I have a good amount open, they don't use memory/resources. Integrates with container tabs, so certain sites can always load in a specific container and show up in a specific panel. (I do this with LinkedIn as its own, because LinkedIn is super creepy/invasive.)
It's good to see them improving on Firefox. I'm intrigued by the profile management the most because I have some hope that this will indirectly fix my problem with the browser, which I had to deal with again last week.
I'm glad to hear both of those and the recent improved performance of Firefox; even installed it again to test. However, I ain't sure I'll be switching back to main Firefox since Floorp already has some of these features like vertical tab [and better tree-style tab integration].
The AI stuff seems to be the new meme of the day. I wonder whether this will be feature everyone lets go of in the future. I've barely used it though.
I haven’t dabbled much, but every time I’ve looked at AI in the browser, it’s almost always a lite version or otherwise require money. Just my own personal preference, but there’s nothing a browser AI can offer at the moment that can justify me paying for access to it.
Many AI services cost money because they use hosted models from OpenAI, Claude, or Gemini. This feature however runs a local model in the browser, completely on your device. It's an accessibility tool, so it seems unlikely to cost money.
They're probably using an adaption of LLaVA, Phi-3-vision, or some other vision model for describing images.
As NPUs become more available, and AI features are further developed and optimized, I expect to see more locally-hosted options becoming available.
I actually have vertical tabs already thanks to an addin and some file modification to get rid of the horizontal tabs.
That said hoping this makes it smoother
I've been using Tree Style Tabs for basically as long as it's been around. It's always been a pain to get rid of the standard horizontal tabs - it's one of those things that you have to "hack" the browser to get done.
My fear is that their implementation won't be as nice and it will be just as hard to get rid of the new tabs as it is to get rid of the current tabs.
It would be nice if they added APIs to allow addons to fully replace native vertical tabs with their own. Seems like it should be easy to implement with how vertical tab addons use the existing sidebar APIs.
Vertical tabs was one of the major things that drove me to Vivaldi. I'll likely still continue to use it for other reasons (love all of the shortcuts and such), but it's nice to see another option that has this.
I have been bouncing between Vivaldi and Firefox for a couple years now and the gestures native to Vivaldi are the thing that keeps tickling the back of my mind when using Firefox. I'm super into the addition of tab grouping and (even though I don't use it) vertical tabs but bring me gestures!
Been a while since I tried Vivaldi but I'm totally with you on the usefulness of gestures. I've been using Firefox with the Foxy Gestures extension for as long as I can remember and honestly any other browser, file explorer, or other such ui feels sluggish in comparison. Every time I use another computer or browser for whatever reason, I instinctively try to use a gesture before realizing "oh...".
Vertical tabs and other features discussed here are in nightly-larch builds as of now.
If the "ai" stays offline and can be disabled then fine. Except the reported performance improvements this seems like nothing that would bring fundamental improvements instead of nice-to-have but could have been worked around.
I use Firefox and I advocate for using Firefox but that is only because of things such as arkenfox and because the alternatives are orders of magnitude worse. It would be nice if instead of nice to haves they instead tried to be the browser that actually goes against the flow and respects the user and the agency of the user without requiring a high amount of effort but fine.
Their other AI feature, for translation, is entirely local and opt-in.