Now, imagine all of the “background” tabs being nested automatically under the current one, and then being able to act on that collection of tabs. In addition, if implemented with some thought, you could have new tabs nest under their parent tab.Īs an example, if you’re like me, researching anything usually entails opening background tabs for every link on the page you’re currently reading. With vertical tabs you can make the tab list as wide as you want, and thus can fit the favicon plus portions (if not all) of the document title. (A very fun fact: Safari didn’t support favicons until 2018.) And this is especially grating when the favicon is the same for more than one tab for example, if you rely heavily on Google Docs, you might have 10 tabs with the same favicon. I suspect that most of us these days have so many tabs open that the only information we can garner from the actual tabs is the favicons. One of the many virtues of vertical tabs is that you can glean much more information from them. Everyone knows that vertical tabs make more sense-I mean, you do keep your Dock vertical (and hidden), right? Why the hell don’t any of the major browsers currently support native vertical tabs? It’s insanity. (The young bloods will say it’s fake, but back in the day Opera was all about power-user features.) Now that it’s based on Chrome, the only options are poorly-integrated extensions. But, at some point, none of us used Opera anymore, and I think they eventually yanked vertical tabs besides. It must be over a decade ago now, maybe 15 years, since Opera introduced vertical tabs, and listen to me when I tell you this: they were a goddamn revelation. But let’s be crystal clear here: I never really stopped thinking about them. (Yep, MS has a browser called Edge, and it, like everything else these days, is Chrome under the hood.) This news, together with a recent off-hand comment from a friend, got me thinking about vertical tabs again. A few weeks ago Microsoft announced that vertical tabs were coming to its Edge browser later this summer.

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