Presenting the future of tabs in Microsoft Edge!

Question

Currently, tabs become very impractical when users have loads of them open -- the titles shrink-down to the point where eventually all you have are a few letters from the start of the page title, and beyond that, just the favicons. While desktop and laptop users can hover-over the tabs to see the title in the screentip, this is difficult for touchscreen-only users to do without accidentally closing the tab, or switching to it.

So, thinking back to how Windows XP solved this issue for the Taskbar, it made me wonder -- why has no browser yet copied that same approach for websites?

And with that... presenting a mock-up of how this could look!

hotcakex · Answer

Vertical Tabs feature was Exactly introduced to solve this problem.

dftf-wip · Answer

That solves the problem only for users who wish to use vertical tabs... your preference may not be that of other users, remember.

For those of us who prefer horizontal tabs, I'd suggest the way I've proposed is a more-elegant solution than Vivaldi (currently the only-other browser I know-of to try and tackle this) where it simply overflows into a second row of tabs. (And then presumably, a third, then fourth, until eventually is mimics IE6 of the early 2000s and the multiple-rows of toolbars some users would have!)

hotcakex · Answer

They spent months developing and testing this feature to tackle this problem.

it's Not about people wishing to use the vertical tabs, people use it 1) if they want to 2) when tabs are too many to fit in the horizontal tab strip.

it's your choice in the end to use it or not, but maybe someone then come and say i want a circular tab strip, because they don't want to use horizontal nor vertical.

so my point is, vertical tab strip wasn't introduced only as a different style of browsing, it was mainly for solving the problem of horizontal tab strip with too many tabs.

there are other ways, such as having a scrollable horizontal tab strip, Chromium had it for some time I remember.

dftf-wip · Answer

"but maybe someone then come and say i want a circular tab strip"In which case they simply go into the Edge settings, find "Group pages from the same site into a single tab" and turn it off. Then it goes back to the current style of all horizontal tabs just getting smaller until eventually you have to scroll left-and-right to see those in the overflow.And, of course, this new style would be off-by-default, and simply advertised to users, similar to how features like Collections pop-up.Windows XP allowed for grouping to be on or off, as does Windows 10 still today. I'm not proposing this new style suddenly becomes the only way to do things, but for users who prefer horizontal tabs I think it's a better way of doing things than Vivaldi's idea of just endlessly adding additional rows of tabs when the overflow point is breached

hotcakex · Answer

That's not quite the circular tab strip i meant, i meant something like a circle at the top (which would look weird of course, hard to imagine),oh and btw, for horizontal/vertical tab strip, tab groups can be collapsed to save space.there are 4 related "tab group" flags in edge://flags/

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Presenting the future of tabs in Microsoft Edge!

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