Brave Browser introduces vertical tabs

ojkelly

The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that I want a browser that functions like an IDE.

Multiple panes with tabs, that can be resized either to custom sizes or automatically (binary space partitioning).

It’s too much for a general purpose browser, which is how we’ve got the Chrome, Safari, Firefox we have. But I think the appeal of a more information-dense browser is broader than we think, anyone doing research would benefit from it.

morsch

Vertical tabs without nesting (trees) is such a wasted opportunity. Nesting lets you close/minimise/etc a group of a related tabs, eg. all the search results you opened from a single query. I hope Brave's implementation at least lets you switch tabs using the mouse wheel, which is probably my favorite feature of the Firefox vertical tabs addons.

BTW, I was a TST user for many years, and recently switched to Sidebery, which seems to do the same and more, but is a bit more polished.

biggestfan

It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar. You can see in the video they posted that it saves almost no vertical space, while now taking up a massive amount of horizontal space.

scelerat

OmniWeb (from Omnigroup, developers of OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner et al) was their web browser offering in a particularly fecund period of browser development in the early 2000s, which had vertical tabs. The tabs themselves were little thumbnails of the contents of the web page in question.

I used OmniWeb as my main browser for many years, right up until Firebug and Firefox became the preferred development environment. Great browser, a lot of great UI ideas out of that shop.

CoBE10

I've been using Firefox with Tab Center Reborn, and a config which collapses the tabs so only the favicons are visible. Using Shift-Tab, Ctrl-Shift-Tab and Ctrl-T, Ctrl-W to go around and open/close is so logical for me. First time I heard about Tree style tabs I was so against them because they occupied significant amount of space and I didn't know you could collapse them. I don't see myself ever going back horizontal tabs. Vertical is so much better, especially on smaller screen (like 1366x768), where horizontal space isn't needed that much as vertical is.

My setup: https://i.imgur.com/sZ8zdol.png

bradgessler

The more enhancements I see browser vendors making to tabs, the more I think they’re reinventing bookmarks/favorites.

Safari introduced “tab groups” a while back, which to me is an insane mess of complexity. When I think about it though they’re just folders and each tab is a bookmark/favorite.

The vertical tabs in Brave remind me of bookmarks/favorites too.

whatscooking

I care more about having enough horizontal space to do split view than I care about having 10px of vertical space

hardwaresofton

If you think this is awesome you should check out a browser a friend of mine is building called Horse (yes, called “horse”)

https://browser.horse/

The reason I like it is that he’s unified tabs and bookmarks almost, it’s a great UX that looks like some things you might have seen but still feels different.

He’s also got wicked design sense — but I’m biased so. I also feel like I’m doing him a disservice — he’s got one of those silly lifetime deals going right now.

slily

Why do people need dozens or hundreds of tabs to the point that they need groups for them? We've had bookmarks (and folders for them) for decades... It made way more sense when you could expect tabs to always be loaded, and not behave like another set of bookmarks.

gnicholas

I’ve been using this on Brave dev for several months. It’s great! I hope they enable nested tabs, which I loved having in TST on Firefox.

ameminator

I've had vertical tabs in Vivaldi for a little while now. I hope you guys enjoy it over on Brave as well, they change how you use tabs. Strongly recommended.

DerekBickerton

Never liked vertical tabs. Horses for courses, personal preference and all that. My muscle memory for normal/horizontal tab layouts is so ingrained in me, that using anything different would take on a huge unlearning.

usrbinbash

This basically adresses my biggest gripe with tabs in an elegant way:

The primary input mechanism for dealing with a large amount of "list entries" in any GUI software, nowadays is scrolling. While scrolling can be implemented in horizontal tabs, browsers prevented it from being used efficiently. Tabs all have to fit on that bar, and if they don't, for some reason you couldn't scroll but had to click little buttons, or if you could scoll, it wouldve been a bad UX, since tabs horizontal scrolling goes too fast for the user, or takes too long.

Vertical tabs. Nice. From now on, any browser not offering this feature, shouldn't even bother applying. Nicely done Brave!

aka-ani

What I've learned trying to analyse my preference for vertical tabs is that it's not so much about saving horizontal space vs vertical space. It's more just about showing more information on screen before needing to scroll.

With regular horizontal tabs you either squeeze all tabs to fit the window width, in which case you stop being able to read page titles at some point. Or you have a horizontal scroll on the tab bar which also means you can only read so many titles on screen (probably fewer) before needing to scroll.

The vertical tabs switch this up by being able to show a larger number of tab titles before you have to scroll down. Of course this depends on the width of your vertical tab sidebar but having word wrap or configurable height on horizontal tab bars isn't ever presented as an option so can't compare.

Another clue to understanding my preference was when I realised I actually really like being able to have multiple rows of horizontal tabs vs a horizontally scrolling tab bar. So I think it just came down to the density of information visually available before having to do any scrolling.

I do think it all just comes down to personal preferences and muscle memory and individual use cases (for example, some people like having 50+ tabs open, others don't). So I am very hesitant to call one approach better. I just don't understand why we can't have both options more available everywhere.

stranded22

I have just found that ‘disable JavaScript’ in Brave on iOS removes ‘Promoted Posts’ on Reddit on mobile.

So, looks like I’ll move to that when Apollo shuts down.

Works with Twitter too - I’m a noob smh.

*looks like I’m wrong- now not loading. Oh well.

omneity

The crypto wallet video ad in the middle of the article is intrusive and frankly infuriating, especially when there is no video illustrating the lifecycle of the new vertical tabs.

zamadatix

Anyone remember the "Compact Navigation" test Chrome did ~a decade ago? https://pureinfotech.com/how-to-enable-compact-navigation-fe...

It had a major downside of putting browser chrome over the page area and hiding the URL. Over time the latter has become the default anyways but the former is still iffy. Safari approached this concept more recently, as the only browser I'm aware with this as an officially supported option, but put the URL bar directly in the tab, which is a bit more awkward to use. On Vivaldi there is the option to hide it but then activate it via a keyboard shortcut/gesture, which functions similarly but can cause extra switching between keyboard based navigation and mouse based navigation (the latter of which can be very hard to avoid). Because of the way Vivaldi is implemented it's always performed a lot worse than other Chromium based browsers for me as well. In Firefox there were several CSS hacks for this but it was constantly falling apart on updates so I gave up on it.

I guess the long story short is: as a very light tab user (1-8 throughout the day) I miss this old option in Chrom* greatly.

eviks

Been using that in Vivaldi and it's great, glad to see i this UI feature moving elsewhere

game_the0ry

I really liked brave and this is an interesting feature, but I had to stop using it when I tried syncing my bookmarks - for some reason, a bunch ended up duplicating, and I have a lot of bookmarks that are well organized.

Otherwise, I would have kept using it - it was fast and energy efficient on my intel macbook, way better than chrome.

I also have to say - I hate when I have so many tabs open. It's basically a manifestation of my ADHD. I need to focus one thing at a time.

kusuriya

Im conflicted, I like the general idea behind brave, their vertical tabs look good, but the browser deeply integrates this crypto grift and robs sites I visit and have their ads allowed of their revenue then wants them to "opt-in" to their grift to get the money they stole.

iansinnott

Now if only you could hide the tab-favicon sidebar...

Arc does this, but they don't give you the URL bar. It may sound nitpicky (and it is) but I really want the hidden tab sidebar AND a visible URL bar. Here's hoping either Arc or Brave will make this an option.

hsjqllzlfkf

Firefox has tree style tabs, and no crypto. Win win

zcmack

close your damn tabs, heathens

ChubbyGlasses

More and more I've wanted a browser based on WebKit/Blink from a company with the original Mozilla's values. I know this will get a lot of flack, but Gecko feels way too antiquated for what I want out of a modern browser. Not to mention, browsers are significantly complicated that splitting developer efforts just doesn't seem like a good idea; Firefox keeps falling further behind in term of modern features.

khwhahn

More browsers need to make "tab categories" available. It really helps to organize your tab clutter by topic.

TradingPlaces

Kagi’s Orion browser also has this. I like it.

hedora

A while back, I switched to just using private mode all the time, and haven’t looked back.

The main problem I have now is that I have trouble finding old stuff because internet search keeps getting worse.

Bookmarks aren’t really a solution because they are not searchable, and I’m bad at predicting what I will want to re-read in 5-10 years.

james_pm

Everyone is copying Arc. Microsoft showed a similar design to what Arc has along with vertical tabs.

smrtinsert

Vertical everything. It makes everything so easy to read and scan. I encourage vertical definitions for jr devs, especially ones tempted to put a 20 conditional if statement horizontally (no I don't want to talk about it).

iJohnDoe

Queue the incoming Mozilla and Google employees to start spewing, “Brave has Crypto!”.

Brave has been the best innovation in browsers in recent years. A pleasure to use. Kudos to them and their users for putting up with all the hate.

drunkan

The Orion browser has had this for a while and has the best native implementation by far I just hope they don’t remain pigeonholed into apple OS as they currently are

wly_cdgr

Why would they do something so controversial yet so brave?

nine_k

Maybe eventually mainstream browsers will get to the level of functionality of Firefox + Tree Style Tabs.

(Sadly, I can't call Firefox all that mainstream today.)

scns

Love it. Vimiums keys for switching tabs are reversed though. K goes down and J up. Still easier to remember than which one goes left/right.

mmphosis

No tabs is my preference https://iili.io/Hrtppup.png

itsbits

Have been using same via Chromium Edge browser. I also like workspaces feature. It's very handy to give some context to the group of tabs.

Pxtl

I tend to dock my windows taskbar left for the same reasons and I'm not upgrading to 11 until they let me keep that.

elforce002

Ngl, I'm digging this feature.

SxC97

Looks like there’s no tree functionality. I’ll be sticking with Orion for the time being.

bestest

Arc has been using this approach from the beginning — https://arc.net/gift/a192125e (here's an invite for whoever would like to try it out).

The more I think about it — the more Arc reminds me of an IDE. A browser IDE of a kind.

joduplessis

Nice. For some reason, vertical tabs just have never taken for me.

deafpolygon

It looks nearly identical to Edge's vertical tab.

tortoise_in

Why use brave when Firefox and Chrome exists?

noobdev9000

Tabs are entirely useless and wrong abstraction. Look at VSCode, you just use Command Palette to search for anything. That's good

meghan_rain

aka bookmarks

DanielHB

no tab preview like old opera? That was like my favourite feature

svet_0

Brave gives a very bad vibe (mostly due to the affiliate links scandal), I prefer to just use my favorite browsers (ff/edge) + uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger which give good privacy/adblock experience, are open source and customizable to my liking.

bandzest

I was waiting for the 'Arc'-ening to happen.

DonHopkins

Now all it needs is pie menus (like in Blender, The Sims, etc) that you can pop up by clicking on the tabs, and it will be as fun, efficient, and easy to use as UniPress Emacs was in 1988!

HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU

>Demo of UniPress Emacs based HyperTIES authoring tool, by Don Hopkins, at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab.

HyperTIES discussions from Hacker News:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/hyperties-discussions-from-hac...

I later implemented pie menus and tabbed windows for the NeWS Toolkit (TNT) "Open Look" window manager in 1990 for Sun OpenWindows (X11/NeWS), that let you drag the tabs around to any edge of the window, and wrap all your windows in tabbed frames, even including X11 windows!

NeWS Tab Window Demo (This video may not play in some regions due to copyrighted music):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMcmQk-q0k4

>Demo of the Pie Menu Tab Window Manager for The NeWS Toolkit 2.0. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.

Object oriented PostScript source code for NeWS TNT 2.0 pie menus and tabbed windows:

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/pie.ps

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/win/tab.ps

Tabbed window (with pop-up pie menus on the tabs) are also great for representing PostScript object stuck onto a "stack":

PSIBER Space Deck Demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuC_DDgQmsM

The Shape of PSIBER Space: PostScript Interactive Bug Eradication Routines — October 1989:

https://donhopkins.medium.com/the-shape-of-psiber-space-octo...

Tabbed Windows - History:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#History

>Don Hopkins developed and released several versions of tabbed window frames for the NeWS window system as free software, which the window manager applied to all NeWS applications, and enabled users to drag the tabs around to any edge of the window.[5]

>The NeWS version of UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor was another early product with multiple tabbed windows in 1988.[6] It was used to develop an authoring tool for Ben Shneiderman's hypermedia browser HyperTIES (the NeWS workstation version of The Interactive Encyclopedia System), in 1988 at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab.[7][8] HyperTIES also supported pie menus for managing windows and browsing hypermedia documents with PostScript applets.

HyperTIES browser and Gosling Emacs authoring tool with pie menus on the NeWS window system:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_(interface)#/media/File:Hy...

>HyperTIES is an early hypermedia browser developed under the direction of Dr. Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab. This screen snapshot shows the HyperTIES authoring tool (built with UniPress's Gosling Emacs text editor, written in MockLisp) and browser (built with the NeWS window system, written in PostScript, C and Forth). The tabbed windows and pie menu reusable components were developed by Don Hopkins, who also developed the NeWS Emacs (NeMACS) and HyperTIES user interfaces. (Sorry about the quality -- this is a scan of an old screen dump printed by a laser printer.)

elbrian

I see the name “Brave Browser” and my brain just refuses to engage. Their marketing team ruined the product for me before I ever got the chance to try it.

adr1an

Sidebery firefox addon, among others, saves you of making richer CEOs that are against human rights (search for brendan eich homophobia).