Forum Discussion
Tree Style Tab - give me space!
With the default for monitors now firmly stuck on wide screen, please please please can we have the ability to put the tabs down the side of the screen? It releases so much space to actually browsing web sites, most of which do not use the full width of the screen. (Just look at this page!)
In Firefox, we currently have TreeStyle Tab, which lets me have tabs down the side, and group them in hierarchies so I can keep similar tabs together.
Chrome does not have anything like this (at least, not that I have found - it has some that work as a pop out but not well integrated).
https://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en#features
FOr anyone interested, the nearest I have ever found in Chrome was Tabs Outliner
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tabs-outliner/eggkanocgddhmamlbiijnphhppkpkmkl
... but it creates a hover-over window of the tabs rather than being within the browser. I used it for a few weeks before getting frustrated with having to move it out of the way.
- Elliot Kirk
Microsoft
Thank you for the suggestion fedupwithusernames (I love the name, I totally agree with the sentiment). I will forward this on to the tab management and user experience teams.I completely agree with organizing tabs in a side pane. It's a much better utilization of screen space and is soooo much easier to manage a large number ot tabs.
Given the wide format of most screens these days, if the browser was invented all over again today, it seems logical to put the tabs on the side would be the solution
The lack of this feature in Chrome is one of the main reasons FireFox has been primary browser.
The FireFox Tree Tabs extention has a ton of features that would be smart for Edge to include, such as folders, groups, and sessions. The customization is nice too. What Tree Tabs lacks is a bit of GUI refinement and session saving.
Elliot Kirk Thanks for your interest.
There are benefits to reusing a username in that across sites, people can follow you. BUT it gives another avenue for those with less than honest intentions to explore for weaknesses - especially when the same username/password comination is repeated multiple times. I'm far more in favour of random usernames.
Elliot Kirk Since I last posted, and now that Edge Dev is able to use the Chrome store, I have been using Tabs Outliner, and have even paid a small sum for the full version (a few extras, but it helps encourage the developer). It has an amazing set of features, and if used carefully it can be a real benefit. The key feature is that it can close your tabs for you, thus releasing memory and resources, yet still remember them and reopen them at will. It can manage several different browser windows, and close them and reopen them at will, even days or weeks later. It has been exceedingly useful while doing family tree work, so that I can keep different lines of research apart, and even suspend them when I need to do real stuff, and return later.
It would make a good base for a Microsoft option.
The irritating thing is that I cannot dock the Tabs Outliner window with the other Edge Dev windows; they have to be manually sized and sometimes seem to go out of line. That is why I gave up on it a year ago when I tried it in Chrome. At the time I just went back to Firefox, where Tree Style Tabs worked well. But having now used it for a couple of weeks, it is so good that I would even consider a third screen just to put the Tabs Outliner window into.
fedupwithusernames Tabs Outliner sadly isn't the way forward.
It lost its paid for abilities in Edge, Edge beta and Edge Dev, because it cannot cope with the updates to Edge, saying it is not registered. It was a chrome add on, and Microsoft say there may be issues.
I still use it a lot in Chrome (+beta +canary) which have therefore become my goto browsers instead of edge. Sadly the developer seems to have gone missing, having been responsive. That means the paid for version can save the tab tree to the cloud, but not restore it. It is a minor irritation solved by saving locally to a pondering folder so it syncs across my computers.
Firefox is still a goto browser but because tree style tabs needs the tabs open to work well, it gets to cluttered. With tabs outliner, it is like having a tree of dynamic favourites that remember the last page used on a site.
Please Microsoft - if one lone developer could do it.... surely it is easy for an organisation like yours.
This is absolutely my primary reason for using Firefox and for despising Chrome.
I have no doubt that if Microsoft does this ONE thing well, it will immediately make a huge difference in the uptick in browser market share.
Again, Microsoft, do this and make your core IT people (aka mavens) actually _want_ to use the new Edge.
- Same here. Aside from my appreciation of Rust in the codebase, the only thing keeping me on Firefox is the tree style tabs addon's capability.
I second this. Guys, please implement tab tree support, it will be a real motivation for power users to migrate to Edge.
Proper tab tree support should include:
- An ability to hide horizontal tabs
- Automatic tree structuring (when you open a new tab it becomes a child of current one)
- An ability to close a subtree with one click
- Pinned tabs
- (Optional) Tab groups
At the moment Firefox is the only browser with first-class tab tree support (see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/).
Also there is a very good extension for Opera and Vivaldi (see https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/tree-tabs/), but unfortunately not stable enough. Also on Opera you can't hide tabbar and you need to follow a complex procedure to get it working on Vivaldi.
Also there is a Chrome extension named Sidewise (http://www.sidewise.info/) but it's a real pain to use it because of Chrome's UI limitations (it's a separate window, you can't hide horizontal tabbar).
Microsoft, please, implement proper tab tree support in Edge. Seems like you are the only company who may listen to users and have enough capacity to deliver this feature...
Vivaldi, another chromium based browser, has the ability to show the tab bar on the left or right, stacked like firefox's treestyletabs, as well as the bottom (like windows 8's default browser!)
While it doesn't nest child tabs like treestyletabs it does allow for far more tabs to be open without obscuring the tab names. It works much better than the extensions available for Google Chrome. Hopefully something like that could be implemented for the new Edge :)
- Good spot. Yes, I found that during the week and hadn't got round to posting. It proves it can be done within the browser.
Count me in on this!
I just created the Tech Community login for the sole purpose of supporting this suggestion!
It is beyond my understanding why "vertical tab trees" are not standard in 2020 and not supported by every browser. For me TreeStyleTab is the only reason to use Firefox as main browser.
I mean... Monitros get wider and wider, but it seems no browser wants to utilize that extra space. It makes organizing and keeping track of your tabs so much easier.Hey guys. I have a little surprise for you. Over the quarantine I've been working on a little something that I've been wanting forever - Open Tree Style Tab. As a previous TST firefox add-on myself, I realised the options available on the store just wasn't up to par with the experience I had with the original add-on. So I created the version that I would have liked personally as well as utilising all the functionalities available provided by the browser. The project is and will continue to remain open-sourced, I'm excited to improve it everyday and if you have any feedback, let me know!
