Ode to a vertical tab strip in Firefox
Overlooked Firefox keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl-PageUp and Ctrl-PageDown cycle between tabs in a window. So do Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab.
Source: Nelson's Weblog: tech / good / firefoxTabs
Remember when I started singing the praises of OmniWeb's Tab Drawer? Well, I eventually got snared back into the clutches of Firefox—I blame the monkey—and have since wandered away from the drawer of tabs.
SessionSaver gave me what I needed to weather the occasional crash with my reading queue in open tabs intact. And a month or so after that, I discovered a hack to switch Firefox tabs to vertical. Now, all I need is for someone (maybe me?) to get thumbnails of pages drawing in this vertical tab strip, and I'll be golden.
What does all this have to do with the above quote? Well, just that it reminded me of all this, and that now the Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDn tab navigation shortcuts make perfect intuitive sense—because they walk up and down in my tab strip.
Oh yeah, and here's what it looks like:
Archived Comments
Seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeexy. After all, horizontal screenspace is far more often a commodity than is vertical screenspace. [After all, everyone puts browser chrome top and bottom, no?] Hopefully this will push developers to do more stuff on the sides, keeping us from having a 900px high browser window with only 500px of usable, scrollable space. After all, Few People Like to Scroll™.
Very nice.. I hooked my browser up like this today.. (I've been meaning to try out session saver too, so I also hooked myself up w/ that today too)
Ok, for those of us who are NON-code monkeys, how did you get it to center the tabs?...Hmmmm?..
Nick: Yours aren't centered? Actually, I'd rather mine were up at the top of the strip, but for some reason I don't quite yet understand, they're centered.
(Oh yeah, and did you ever fix your blog comments? :) And, sometime we need to synch up for a beer!)
I don't like it because of how much screenspace it eats regardless of number of tabs.
Here's my currently unfulfillable wish: stacking the vertical tab bar and the bookmark sidebar in the same space.
I'd replace the horizontal bookmark toolbar and the tab strip faster than you can say "onion" if I could have that. Not only would it offer the bonus of freeing up even more vertical space than the vertical tab bar, it would also comfortably fit both my personal toolbar bookmarks and lots of tabs, with space left over---whereas the horizontal versions are always claustrophobic.
Les, you may be interested in Tab Catalog.
Or the Tab Sidebar.
Or not. :)
I'm loving this! (Though I'm using Vertigo to deploy it.) An unexpected benefit was that the new position benefits enormously from Fitt's law (it's practically infinite no matter is width): all of a sudden switching tabs with the mousewheel becomes not only intuitive but fast.