That's a cool idea. Move the rest of the browser chrome into the left bar as well. Less of vertical tabs as an entire vertical chrome.

They certainly do save space on Firefox (with the right config).

In the default setting, there is OS title bar, then a address+icon bar, then the tab bar.

After installing sidebar tabs, you can remove the tab bar with some css, which saves about 5% of the vertical screen space.

You can also remove that unnecessarily large sidebar header that Firefox insists on not letting users disable via normal means with userchrome mods. Some such setups can be seen at https://firefoxcss-store.github.io/.

"tab bar in titlebar" has been the Firefox default for a number of years at this point. If Linux, your distro/packager of choice may have overridden that. The only true exception to this is tile based WMs (which don't have title bars) but in that case it's still above by default.

You are correct. I have been using sidebar tabs for probably a decade now, so I had completely forgotten about the redesign.

Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we typically don't watch movies in the office.

> Perhaps we should just make monitors in 4:3 like we used to instead of 16:9 which is ridiculous since we don't typically watch movies in the office.

That's on the right track, but going too far. 16:10 or 3:2 is much more reasonable.

The idea of using 16:9 screens for work needs to die in a fire.

IMO the closer the ratio gets to 1 the better but the only fact I have for this is 1280x1024 (5:4) being better than 1024x768 (4:3)

Meanwhile here I am, using an ultrawide 21:9 monitor and loving it as I can easily split it in two or three columns whenever I need. I don't understand why people like squarish monitors so much, the human FOV is not square.

Widescreen and especially ultrawide makes sense with bigger screens but is terrible on laptop-sizes screens, at least outside of media consumption.

How is the human FOV relevant? I just want to be able to fit as much vertical content into the visible area as possible. Because almost all documents we use are vertically organized.

y'all need to get yourself tiling window managers.

It's not ridiculous at all if you have to compare two documents side-by-side which is something I do 10 times a day while coding whether its documentation+code or doing a git diff

FWIW, I'm using a single ultra wide screen and never have any full screen windows, always two side by side. Most Linux DEs and even Windows support this out of the box, for macOS there's spectacle.

That said, working on a web project right now, we _are_ ensuring it looks good when maximised on ultra wide monitors, because we figure people might actually do that. But I'm with you there, for most web content it's ridiculous.

I found that 21:9 works very well for me for work (gaming too, mind you). Sheets can show many rows, I can compare things side by side, I can maximize a console with ridiculously long lines, and I can dock the dev tools in the browser to the side. It's a like two 5:4s, side by side, without the bezels.

I have a 16:9 screen in portrait orientation, excellent for reading/writing etc. One small annoyance of 1080 as horizontal resolution is that it is just slightly too thin for some web layouts.

Sat next to it is a 32" 2560x1440 unit (they have near identical pixel pitch, so I don't have to worry about oddities like differential scaling between screens) that most of the time is split into two halves or ⅔+⅓ (under windows, the FancyZones util in PowerToys is handy for this).

I liked the arrangement so much at home that I've replicated it at my own expense in the office.

> It's strange to me how a key selling point of these vertical tabs is "save on vertical space", but they almost always still include a header bar.

Honestly, that's not the main selling point of vertical tabs for me. Horizontal tabs don't scale for more than a dozen or so, but vertical tabs do. The "wasted" horizontal space is useless for reading most page, but displays enough data for practical navigation, and the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).

> the vertical organization allows more-developed vertical scrolling technologies to be used with the tab list (e.g. scroll wheels).

Firefox also lets you scroll the tabs horizontally. Which I prefer to Brave's approach of simply not displaying the last tabs in the bar if it's too many, which means newly opened tabs simply never show up while the others are shrunk so far they become difficult to hit with the cursor.

But it's easier to scroll vertically, also because the scroll area is bigger

Arc moves the header bar stuff (URL) to the left pane, so the entire right pane is site content.

Arc is way ahead on browser UX. Opening links in Pinned Tabs into a modal over the Pinned Tab content is exactly how I want to use link aggregator sites

I hope Arc's vertical tab could support nesting/tree feature, which is really useful.

You can hide the title bar while vertical tabs are enabled. I am using it on a laptop and it feels great.

I struggle finding good page <titles> with the amount of space browsers give you. You should at least be able to see which tab is what if you have 3 for a website.

The trick is to hide all extra stuff like address bar, tabs, settings, OS related bars, etc. and alonly show the browser stuff upon Ctrl+L. It's so much nicer, especially with an wm that's just gets out of the way - awesomewm

Yes, they don't follow their own principles to the logical conclusion In Vivaldi it's much better - you can get rid of the header bar completely and only have the search/tool bar, styled to be narrower, saves real space

And since horizontal space is cheap in most websites, the latter part is less of an issue (though you still don't need it to be massive)

Saving 40px of vertical space in lieu of losing 120px of horizontal space?

When was the last time that those 120px of horizontal space made a difference?

I can use 2 windows side by side and the pane just eats horizontal padding on most sites because narrow columns are prettier and easier to read.