I tried it out and it seems clear that vertical tabs without titles create too much friction for daily driving a browser where you have many tabs open, hover thumbnails or not.
For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.
Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.
I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.
Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.
But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.
I had the same issue but it turns out you can expand them to show the titles by clicking the "side bar" button that, for me, was left of my address bar. Odd default but this is in a nightly release and others have already provided feedback to them on this.
For a few years I have thought that Firefox could gain market share by doing more with the browser UI, steal a few ideas from Arc Browser for instance. There's a lot of value to be added in the UI for sure.
Asking users what they want and then building it ends up with solutions like these. I really hope this gets a lot more iteration before landing in stable.
I currently use SlidePad on Mac which allows touching the left side of the screen to pop out a vertically tabbed browser, for IMs and most used AI chat but would rather keep everything in Firefox with some kind of panel system. I think most of us have pinned tabs for communication channels, email, socials, etc.
Vertical tabs on left with titles works if you can also configure a useful slide out panel on right, mixing the two feels odd to me.
But really good to see something happening finally, so good news overall.