I was really enjoying tree tabs and panels of the Arc browser [0] but decided to rollback to firefox so I could have something cross platform. Sidebery lets me do nested tab groups, tab panels, plus its got my bookmarks as a panel too. Performance so far is really good, with ~50 tabs anyway.
Only trouble is I had to go to relatively great lengths to hide my horizontal tabs: enable userChrome stylesheets, go to about:support to find my Profile folder, create a chrome folder, create a userChrome.css file and paste contents from [1], and restart. So now I have only the side bar of tree tabs, and a hot key to hide/show. Screencap attached [2] (using classic theme for windows from here [3])
Firefox assumes you may have multiple sidebar extensions installed and may need to actively switch between them. Given the sidebar itself is the vestigial home of Firefox's original bookmarks and history panels, many decades ago, before those got newer windows/pages, that assumption isn't necessarily wrong. There were years you could have a bunch of stuff in the sidebar. It is only now that most of that stuff is gone and people are only using the sidebar extension point for this one singular use case (vertical tabs) that the extension/app/page switching header feels redundant and unnecessary.
OK, here goes. I'm on Linux; location of the settings menu may differ, depending on what you use.
- Go to Tools menu, select "Add-Ons and Themes". You can also go to about:addons in the URL bar.
- On that page, I have on the left: Recommendations, Extensions, Themes, Plugins. Choose Extensions.
- You should be in a page that says, "Manage Your Extensions" near the top. Scroll down to find the one in question, Sidebery in this case.
- To the right of the enable/disable toggle, there is an icon with three dots.
- Click the three-dot icon, select "Manage".
- One of the options is, "Run in Private Windows". Select "Allow".
If I open a private window, Sidebery isn't open by default, but is available if the extension icon is clicked in the bar under the tabs, or I click Ctrl-e to toggle back and forth.
I have a thousand github tabs open, that I'm not sure how to file. I use sideberry and other extensions to manage tabs and close them when I need to. Sideberry is the only somewhat efficient(fast) way to quickly search and close tabs. I'm been waiting for the v5 release for a long time. There was something I needed from it, but I don't remember right now.
One thing I wish sideberry would do is simplify keyboard navitation. I.e. the moment you start typing it should type things in the search and then should should be able to navigate the result without mouse.
Maybe someone here can tell me how I can quickly select tabs if I use container tab groups. The address bar only selects open tabs from the right tab group so it's completely useless to me. For a while I used rofi tab switcher[1] but that magically stopped working so I made a custom rofi script that parses brotab[2] output.
Most likely i just have different habits, but I never really understood how people can cope with such a massive amount of tabs.
I genuinely enjoy closing my browser after each day (or maybe just before a break) and starting with a fresh session, no saved sessions for me. For me this has three main benefits
- Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.
- My Attention is directed to the things that I actually need right in that moment
- Even though my booksmarks are more or less messy, I know where to place what, I know where I can find things I need and for the temporary stuff I just have one folder which I work through or sometimes just plainly delete.
I'd say my absolute maximum would be 50 tabs. I doubt, that I ever went above that.
The extension from the OP still sounds nice, even for my use case. Will look into that.
> Less RAM, obviously, while this is not very important it's just nice to have.
Unlike PC RAM which I can expand every time I get a new PC, my mental RAM is limited.
Making sure to put everything I don't need right now into external systems to free up my mental RAM was one of my main takeaways from reading Getting Things Done some 15 years ago, and for me, nested browser tabs is one level of my storage hierarchy.
Also note the word nested.
I can bookmark things, yes, and I do it a lot.
But for me, ctrl-clicking as I read through some documentation first time and then have everything open in a nested level of tabs and then being able to walk backward and forward between a table of contents or a search, concepts, related concepts and related information like blogs or bug reports effortlessly and without losing track of where I am or how I came there (it is just one step up in the hierarchy) is very valuable.
Before I learned to use Tree Style Tabs I'd navigate linearly and be afraid to lose out something important.
Today with TST I am only afraid that someone at Mozilla will finally find a way to totally destroy the extension API, forcing me to go to Mac/Orion (nothing bad about Orion, but I still struggle with Mac shortcuts).
I just don’t want the hassle of managing bookmarks for all except those I want to keep long-term, mainly. Every browser’s bookmark management is higher friction than its tab management.
Bookmarks also don’t preserve scroll state or window positions which makes getting things set back up more annoying. It’s easier to just let it all sit open and be exactly as I expect to the next day.
Sidebery has tab groups, which you can then fold. Also has panels, which are basically full-size permanent tab groups (that can be linked to containers).
> Less RAM
It also lets one enable tab unloading for folded tabs. And you can middle-click on a panel to unload all the tabs in it.
I also use both Tab Stash and Sidebery. Tab Stash is really more for long-lasting / bookmarked tabs / handling various contexts in my mind and work to get back later. Sidebery on the other hand helps me manage what I currently have in mind and to juggle Multi-Account Containers in neat sections.
That said, I've actually ended up using just Tab Stash because yeah, having too much on your Sidebery tree gets messy and now you have to deal with two sets of stashes, and yeah, unlike Tab Stash, Sidebery doesn't let you group them up into sections.
My only complaint with Tab Stash? I wish it retained which Multi-Account Container was used when it stashed a tab. It'd be perfect if it did that.
On a sidenote, I love that Sidebery lets me scroll through the tabs via scroll wheel. It's a thing I missed since I switched to a Mac because last time I checked, you could scroll through tabs on FF Linux but strangely it's not something you can do on Mac.
Sidebery does let you group tabs. Select a few from the sidebar, right click, group, give the group a name, and optionally, collapse so it doesn't take space.
Somehow it glitches and some groups can become undone, but fortunately I haven't seen that glitch in the last few months, it might be solved for good.
I find Vivaldi's implementation very clunky. It has a vertical panel there as well, and they do not play nicely together: they happen to be in the same place but they do not cooperate or interoperate at all.
As an example: in the email client, the folders appear in the side panel, which is conceptually "above" (to the left of) the tabs. (I use English, and in English we read left-to-right, then top-to bottom.) The problem is that in fact, the folders are logically inside the mail tab: they only pertain to the content of a single tab, but they are shown for all tabs.
It is, IMHO, a design mess, and I have tried to convey this to the company, but it seems uninterested.
A second example of neglect of this L-to-R, top-to-bottom rule is GNOME. In GNOME 3 and above, action buttons in dialog boxes appear in the CSD bar at the top... but I have not yet read the contents of the dialog box, so I do not yet know whether I want that action or not. Logically, the buttons should be at the bottom, and grouped together, and this applies equally to R-to-L scripts (such as Hebrew and Arabic) or to writing systems that are conventionally and classically top-to-bottom _then_ side-to-side, such as Chinese and Japanese.
Can Vivaldi collapse/minimize the vertical tabs like in Edge? I tried the setting but I had to drag the sidebar to minimize. It was inconvenient so I came back to Edge.
My issue with Arc is the non-macness of the UI. I find it a great design exercise but is not exactly what I expect from a Mac app.
Orion is much more interesting in terms of UI and also in performance, but I have to say that tab management on Arc is superior, as it has the concept of "folders", not only nested tabs. Orion has something like this planned, but there's no clear date.
Arc is nice to use but I feel bad using it because it’s Chromium-based, which furthers the growing Chromium monopoly. It bugged me enough that I switched back to Safari and Firefox as my main browser (depending on platform), keeping Arc around only for situations where a Chromelike is required.
I haven't used it, but taking a look at the website kind of makes my eyes bleed. There's a lot of clicking involved to see actual screenshots of that thing.
Thanks for that. I share your thoughts on the content density in Arc vs Orion.
The solution you're proposing (kanban style) is intriguing and something I would find pretty useful. Might even make me switch to Orion back.
I switched from Orion mainly because Spaces don't share cookies and sessions with each other, meaning that I can have [Private][Work - General][Work - Client] and use for example Gmail in each of those with different accounts, without fear of switching to a personal/work one.
I also lost tabs in Orion when syncing multiple devices, which Arc has handled flawlessly. It's interesting, because they both use iCloud.
I’ve tried to switch from Tree Style Tabs to Sidebery twice now but it just isn’t reliable enough: losing my tabs on browser restart was an instant uninstall.
This happened once to me a few years back when I installed it for the first time, I had to configure a few things and it hasn't happened since.
I have installed it on other computers since without any configuration and no problems either so maybe they fixed the problem.
In my opinion Tree Style is better than nothing but the performance, personalization, etc of Sidebery is something else.
Sideberry also let’s you create ‘Tab Panels’ to sort tabs into different groupings. Panels can be thought of as separate windows for trees of tabs, but all within the same Firefox maim window. I use it when I’m researching a topic and want to sort tabs into subtopics. Works quite well.
It also meshes well with Firefox Containers, another favorite Firefox feature of mine.
I'm a recent vertical tabs convert (in particular, tab trees). After just a week, it's very hard to live without it—especially at work, where I have a bajillion tabs open at any time, and I don't feel comfortable installing extensions that can read my bookmarks!
Tab Stash is way cooler than this. I found Sidebery to be much faster/efficient than most of the tab extensions, but I love that I can group tabs and 'offload'/archive them with Tab Stash. The only thing missing from Tab Stash was the ability to see which tab is playing audio. I installed the Sound Control extension to list tabs playing audio for that.
What's missing from EVERY tab extension is I just want the ability to show tabs in a tree view, like an ASCII art tree. They all do this indented, css-styled BS that doesn't look more compact or better. I just want an ASCII tree.
Anyway, look at Tab Stash for another alternative.
On top of Tab Stash, I want global `sort | uniq` for all my bookmarks and stashed tabs. A given URL should only ever be bookmarked or stashed once. Let me search for it if I need it again.
I need to check out Tab Stash - while I'd played around with using TabFS for this use case, it was a little bit clunky. Totally agree with your point about global sort/unique which is the basis for my current bookmarking system of https://save.page/docs/saving
I don't do bookmarks, ie. long term archival of tabs, but I sometimes stash/set aside tabs by moving them to their own Sidebery tab. The sidebar itself is tabbed.
Nice!
Can't help but mention Simple Tab Groups [0], that basically solved all my issues with tabs. Absolutely wonderful plugin which just must be in every self-respecting browser.
I tried Sidebery, because my preferred sidebar extension, "Vertical Tabs", has been deleted now.
Sidebery appealed because it combines bookmarks and tabs, something that was easy with XUL addons before Firefox Quantum. (I used "Vertical tabs (simplified)", "Flat Bookmarks", and "Unified Sidebar" and they all worked together seamlessly. Not since Firefox 57 though: all gone now.)
In the early versions, Sidebery was very unstable and both crashed frequently itself and sometimes took the browser with it.
It seems better now.
But I can't drag a tab out of a window to make a window of its own, and I can't drag tabs from one window to another. Those are sine qua non features for me: mandatory, and I can't use sidebar tabs without them.
Does anyone have any tips/tricks they use with Sidebery? Tangentially related, but I love using Firefox’s multi-account containers to access different AWS accounts at the same time (managed with Sidebery!).
If you highlight multiple tabs in Sideberry you can right click and copy the URLs as plain text. I set up a static site (https://textmark.netlify.app) that I can use in any location to reopen those tabs. If the browser I'm opening them on has Sideberry installed, it even preserves the tree structure.
My belief, which happens to be distressingly controversial in this day and age since GitHub subverted and repurposed readme files: the GitHub repository actively shouldn’t have screenshots. A readme should have info about the project, building, that kind of thing, stuff that’s relevant to the source, and things like screenshots should be elsewhere (… and certainly not stored inside the repository, as is far too often done—major cause of repository bloat), on a marketing page or similar. In this case, this is the source code repository, as is traditional, and the project’s homepage is on AMO, so that’s where things like screenshots go, as they should in that model. The fault here is merely that the wrong URL was provided for the submission.
But from my experience trying out other extensions doing the same doesn't break anything. I think they all just go off on the tabs FF has open and do their own thing with it, IME you can install several and switch between them no problem (by switching what sidebar is shown).
Sideberry is a cool extension that I used for quite some time when FF was my primary browser. I have since switched to Vivaldi which has similar feature built in which works pretty well too.
I installed Sidebery and just switched from TST to Sidebery, it kept whole tree structure and there's easily accessible option (from Sidebery's top menu) to switch back to TST.
The only problem so far I have with Sidebery is that it hasn't scrollbar on the left like TST but it seems that it's available in beta and should be included in new version.
So far I'm happy with it, I like how the text color on tabs is fading with time so you can see which tabs you visited recently.
On Firefox extension site it says "Last updated a year ago (Aug 28, 2022)". The beta has been dangling on github for half a year. I'm not installing a beta version which doesn't come from official site where at least some sort of review exists.
I'm curious about this too, I use TST at home and it's gotten really bad with how many tabs I have and how slow it is. I use Sidebery at work and it seems much better.
> I don't know how top-tabs people get through their days!
In my case, I feel the opposite. Having the tabs on the side interrupts the browsing experience and annoys me. I personally do two things that probably makes it easier to live with horizontal tabs:
1. I habitually close tabs. If I'm at 10+, I'll quickly scan them and throw any that I might need later into the bookmark bar (if they aren't in a folder, it triggers me to check them again soon-ish). Then I just purge all tabs because having more than 10 is just a cluttered mess. This is also true in JetBrains, iTerm, Sublime, Finder, etc.
2. I don't fullscreen my browser. It usually only uses about 80% of my screen width, sometimes less. That provides much less incentive to use side tabs
Best firefox upgrade I've done lately is disabling all their "Enhanced Tracking Protection" features. Those are better done by adblock/ublock extensions and disabling them significantly improved the responsiveness and speed of the browser.
Only trouble is I had to go to relatively great lengths to hide my horizontal tabs: enable userChrome stylesheets, go to about:support to find my Profile folder, create a chrome folder, create a userChrome.css file and paste contents from [1], and restart. So now I have only the side bar of tree tabs, and a hot key to hide/show. Screencap attached [2] (using classic theme for windows from here [3])
[0] https://arc.net/
[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...
[2] https://coltenj.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-20...
[3] https://github.com/malvinas2/ClassicThemeForWindows10/tree/m...