TST is literally the killer feature for FF. It's actually the only reason I went to FF, it was getting out of hand to have all my tabs across the top, and it makes little sense with modern screens being so wide that giving up a little horizontal space to get legible titles is absolutely worth it.

Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned. Can't be too hard to do.

> TST is literally the killer feature for FF.

Which raises the question: why would FF sabotage it? Why isn't it easy to hide the default tabs, and why does the sidebar have the name of the extension providing it stuck at the top?

They had all of the warning in the world about how important this extension was to people years before finally removing XUL, half a decade later you still can only repair the display problems through CSS that isn't kept consistent from version to version, and feature requests/bug reports on the issue are filled with antagonism from the project.

  > I don't know why it hasn't been cloned

it's a elitist feature. pretty sure that most ppl on the internet don't know what a tab is.

opera had vertical, grouped tabs over twenty years ago.

TST might be niche but the concept of a tab in general is not something only understood by technically savvy people. We’re not in the era of IE6 anymore.

Opera from twenty years ago was so ahead of its time.

This is a plugin for FF, right?

Is it this one?

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...

I can't overstate how much this extension has benefitted my work life. It's an absolute game changer.

Edge has vertical tabs but no grouping by parent tab.

Edge does have grouping (might be behind edge://flags)

Ohh cool! I have to look into that. My workstation is quite locked down at work so edge is the only alternative to chrome available.

I never got to leverage TST, something about the UX bothers me. I have better flow with Tab Stash. Also TST suffers with my hoarding habits and the subtree features have bare naked UI.

From the extension description, Tab Stash seems to save all open tabs as bookmarks. But this feature is already built into Firefox. Am I missing something? I’ve never used either of these extensions (will be trying out TST) so forgive my ignorance if I’m missing something obvious!

you can stash things as you want, it stacks them in a daily stash by default that you can rename, move links in and out of previous stashes

with TST whenever I need to reorder/re-group things, it's a pain (I still appreciate TST a lot)

Me too. I was a long time TST user but I found I am more productive if I use stashes instead, pin the ones I use daily, and try to only keep what needs to be open in a native tab.

How have I never seen Tab Stash? This is how my brain has wanted bookmarks and tabs to work for many years.

Edge actully does clone it. Which makes Edge quite usable for some things.

“TST is literally the killer feature for FF …”

No - it is figuratively the killer feature.

If it were literally the killer function this would be a very different discussion.

> literally the (killer feature)

vs

> (literally the killer) feature

A "killer feature" is a phrase with its own meaning so we can treat it as an atom and apply modifiers to it. The order of operations matters, and I posit that the OP placed their imaginary parentheses as I did in my first example.

No. There is no such thing as a "literally killer feature" unless it is some feature that can cause death. A killer feature in this case is exclusively figurative and adding "literally" is wrong to do.

Touché!

Stabbity stabbity!

> Someone in Chrome/Edge/Safari must be thinking about doing this, I don't know why it hasn't been cloned.

Easy, most people never use more than five or six tabs because it’s annoying to have more. TST is a solution to a marginal use case so no one invests the time into developing it.

Wow, and here I have a hard time using less than 30 tabs.

Vivaldi does this too.

Edge has vertical tabs and many other features that are not on chrome.

When I saw the title of this article, I assumed it had to be about Tree Style Tags. No other browser feature has so immediately become a feature I must have so quickly.

Privacy and ad-blocking are great, but I could see myself being lazy and switching to a browser with a better UX, if one existed. But you'll have to take Tree Style Tabs from my cold, dead hands

It's pretty much the only reason I'm staying with Firefox. Mozilla has pissed me off often enough for me to attempt to jump ship, but there's just nowhere to go.

(I'm aware of Orion, but when I last used it I found it to still have performance and polish issues)

Sadly the 1Password extension doesn't really work on Orion (no inline autofill and very long UI delays)

You need to use userChrome.css (that's what I do and it works great). it's a bit of a hidden feature, I hope they expose it to extensions eventually, maybe with a different API

https://gist.github.com/ruanbekker/f800e098936b27c7cf956c560...

https://superuser.com/questions/1424478/can-i-hide-native-ta...

https://medium.com/@Aenon/firefox-hide-native-tabs-and-title...

/r/firefoxcss is great for asking questions regarding how to customize TST https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/search?q=tst&restrict_sr...

> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden

1. Go to `about:config` and set toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets true

2. Go to `about:support` and find your profile folder

3. Create subfolder `chrome` there

4. Create file `userChrome.css` in `chrome` folder

5. Put this text in it:

  #main-window #TabsToolbar {
    visibility: collapse !important;
  }

You can hide the tab bar through userstyles css. It can't be done from Firefox itself unfortunately, but once you set it up you never have to do it again.

also check out "sidebery" as a modern alternative that does a bit more

Sideberry feels like a better Tree Tabs.

And Tree Tabs felt like a better Tree Style Tabs (but there were no bugfixes in past 4 years).

Though very rarely Sideberry looses/forgets the tree structure of tabs, and I have to restore it from one of the recent snapshots (which it creates every day automatically).

I've tried to switch from TST to Sidebery twice and both times hit small but bad bugs (restore not working on browser restart) and went back to TST. It's simultaneously slicker but buggier. It looks like Sidebery is still under development though: https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery/issues

I also had bugs years ago, now I have it make snapshots every hour or so as backups (but didn't need them yet)

Am I doing something wrong? Every time I try to move something into a group, it just gets deselected and I have to select them again and then sometimes it works to move into a group.

you select (how this works depends on your settings, I do shift or ctrl + click), right click, group.

but most useful is the auto-grouping of child tabs anyways

Yes, making groups was easy but moving tabs to groups only works every other time I do it. Very strange.

indentation matters (left and right) if that's a problem

I was also going to recommend Sidebery - I switched to it from TST a while back and I've been very impressed with it.

Yup. Sidebery is now Firefox’s killer feature. Won’t live without it.

Is there a way to make TST look nicer? I’m sure a lot of people appreciate its UI, but it really stands out to me in a negative way.

I like using Sidebery, which on top of feeling lighter-weight offers a bunch of themes, including a very clean one.

I use the Proton theme with this custom CSS:

https://gist.github.com/wlonkly/6c21134adbdeb6eb257f52076bc3...

and it gives me a nice and minimalist UI consisting of just-dense-enough tab titles, with the current tab highlighted. Looks like so:

https://i.imgur.com/FB59WfX.png

People hate the UI. It was clean before the transition to webextensions, now it's messy and can only be fixed through futzing with userChrome.css (with no help from mozilla.)

If you like my garish and ugly theme, it is TST friendly (it will theme the TST tabs as long as you pick the "Photon" TST theme in the TST settings): https://alan.norbauer.com/projects/alanglow

It looks nice enough to me on both Linux and Windows. If you're on macOS, though, then yeah, I feel your pain.

Not quite a hidden tab bar but I modded the TST / FF chrome so only active or recently active tabs show (~3min timer) per personal preference: https://gist.github.com/theprojectsomething/6813b2c27611be03...

> I'm looking for a way to have the tab bar hidden.

That's possible by editing userChrome.css. I don't remember the exact incantations, but I'm pretty sure it's mentioned in TST's docs and/or settings page.

I prefer Chrome's tab groups over TST, its simpler and needs less organizing IMO. But needs some more keyboard shortcuts.

Tab search doesn't work across containers afaik and it's therefore pretty useless

As a power user of side tabs, I have switched to Sideberry from TST.

I prefer Berry over Tree Style Tabs. Less clunky UI.