Whenever I see someone using (or a screenshot of) vertical tabs I'm just shocked that people put up with so many open tabs at once.
I have maybe max 20 tabs open at any given time. When I'm done with $TASK I close all the tabs (save 2-3 that remain open and pinned, mail, calendar, etc). The tab bar is like my stack. I only fill it up for the task at hand, then clear the stack and move on when done. If there are things I need to come back to, I use bookmarks.
Vertical tabs and the browser's bookmarks manager are just too similar for me to want to use tabs over bookmarks. Especially considering a crash can wipe all open tabs.
I am glad the browser gives me this option as a setting. And a browser that forces vertical tabs on me will probably lose me as a user for life.
Also:
> since I imagine Safari/Chrome/Edge don't let you make that kind of modification?
MS Edge supports vertical tabs out of the box. Brave also, but I can't comment on the rest in your list.
Look at Mozilla telemetry and you'll see most people have a few tabs open, and overwhelmingly most people's tabs all fit in the horizontal bar with no scrolling. People with more tabs than that are a low single digit percentage.
I feel the same way. Keep limited tabs open most of the time.
But the advantage to vertical and nested tabs is that when I need to open a dozen links (like grabbing interesting links from a page without stopping mid flow) I can do it without having to ruin my environment. The tabs are there ready to be consumed: nicely nested below the source tab. Doing that with a horizontal tab bar would destroy my productivity until I closed all of those tabs. It allows you to switch tasks.
As far as wasted space… I hardly ever use a laptop screen. Text content is ideal at 70ch? That’s like a 1/3rd of a 27” monitor.
You wouldn't be having this argument if you could put your tabs on any edge you wanted to, at any time, even using multiple edges of you run out of space along one edge.
It's an entirely artificial argument that doesn't address the real problem: incompetent UI designers preemptively and inflexibly making that decision for all users in all situation, and forcing everyone to use one edge or the other instead of any or all, therefore squandering 3/4 of the usable perimeter.
I have maybe max 20 tabs open at any given time. When I'm done with $TASK I close all the tabs (save 2-3 that remain open and pinned, mail, calendar, etc). The tab bar is like my stack. I only fill it up for the task at hand, then clear the stack and move on when done. If there are things I need to come back to, I use bookmarks.
Vertical tabs and the browser's bookmarks manager are just too similar for me to want to use tabs over bookmarks. Especially considering a crash can wipe all open tabs.
I am glad the browser gives me this option as a setting. And a browser that forces vertical tabs on me will probably lose me as a user for life.
Also:
> since I imagine Safari/Chrome/Edge don't let you make that kind of modification?
MS Edge supports vertical tabs out of the box. Brave also, but I can't comment on the rest in your list.