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Brief Summary
Orion's vertical tabs are resizable, and can be made fairly small and compact. However, Brave's new vertical tabs feature has a compact mode that's (IMO) significantly better:

  • You can click on a button in the tab bar to switch from compact to "wide".
  • When compact, only the icon of the tab is visible, and the tab bar becomes very compact, taking up as little space as possible.
  • When compact, you can hover over the tab bar to make temporarily wide, allowing you to visually search for tabs by title. As soon as your mouse moves away, the tab bar goes back to being compact. The temporarily wide tab bar doesn't change the viewport, it floats over it.

In contrast, this is the smallest I can get orion's vertical tab bar to be:

And hovering over the tab bar doesn't show me all tab titles, so if I have a bunch of tabs with the same icons (or worse, a deeply nested set of tabs), I still need the horizontal tab bar to visually search for the one I want.

I think this is a significantly better user experience than Orion's right now (and any vertical tabs extension for FF AFAIK), and I would love to have it in Orion so I can finally turn off the horizontal tab bar.

(For those wondering why my windows are the aspect ratio they are: I use yabai to tile my windows, so most times I have two split windows on my screen. This is yet another reason why I'd love to have the vertical tab bar be as small as possible while being usable on a narrow window.)

    Merged 2 posts from Brave-like compact vertical tabs.

      We now have an idea how this should look like, looking for feedback. Note this would flatten the tab hiararchy.

        EDIT: OK, I'm leaving the original feedback below for posterity, but I need to clarify that I had no idea that you could drag the edge of the vertical tab bar in Orion to change its size. I only learned about it because my post was merged into this thread.

        I wonder if there's any way to highlight that functionality... It doesn't exist in Brave (which I only reference a lot because it's the last browser I tried, and the first time I started using vertical tabs).

        Anyway, now that I know we can already collapse the vertical tab bar so it only shows icons, my primary feedback would be: please give us the option to turn on Expand on hover. Thanks! <3

        Brief Summary
        I love vertical tabs, but they can take up a lot of screen real estate, especially when I need to have the browser side-by-side with another window. I think we should have an option to collapse vertical tabs so only the icons are shown.

        Details:
        I really like how Brave's options for vertical tabs, where you can leave them as icons by default, but if you hover the tab area, it expands to show full titles. (In Brave, Hover on expand is optional as well, of course.)

        I will say, Orion's Tab Switcher makes it somewhat viable for me to leave the vertical tab sidebar closed most of the time, but I would still prefer to see the icons so I know at a glance what tabs I have open, without needing to pull up the Tab Switcher, which basically takes up the whole screen.

        Oh, and this is possibly for a separate thread, but I like how in Brave, I have the option for a page preview to pop up on hover. It's not super necessary, just a nice little quality-of-life feature.
        t
        Image/Video:

        Btw, the tab switcher is brilliant. Vertical tabs are great in general, but sometimes I don't want to look all the way over at the left side of the screen to navigate tabs. Being able to call up the Tab Switcher so I can see everything front and center is fantastic.

        • Vlad replied to this.
          Merged 1 post from Collapse vertical tabs to icons only.

            Vlad I like this implementation. What happens when you click on the parent of a collapsed collection of tabs? Does it expand and collapse as normal?

            • Vlad replied to this.

                eirk @Vlad could the default behavior just be like this instead? and then you would be able to shrink the width to just the size of website favicons, as there are no traffic lights in the way anymore

                • Vlad replied to this.

                    olivec Expand on hover is not considered a good UX on Mac. AFAIK no native app does this.

                        eirk No because this kills tree-style tabs.

                          ForumNinja404 there are no tree style tabs possible with this as there is no room. Everything is flattened.

                              Vlad Just wondering what the implementation of sound indicator looks like with this view? My take is it either gets removed completely or the indicator gets it's own altered miniview. Here's me experimenting with what that looks like, but I can't say there's an obvious one that stands out as the best to me.

                                  Vlad Just noticed this, maybe the tabs button at the top should retain its outer border or spacing or some other visual element to distinguish it from the other open tabs.

                                      Vlad Well, I know y'all are a native Mac app and trying to respect the design paradigm, but if I agreed with all of Apple's design decisions I would just use Safari. Hover is perfect if I want to just quickly check what my icons are representing. Without Hover, I would need to do an absurd number of mouse actions to accomplish the same thing:

                                      • Move mouse to the column
                                      • Find the column edge
                                      • Click and hold
                                      • Drag to the right
                                      • Drag back to the left

                                      vs

                                      • Mouse over the column
                                      • Mouse away from the column

                                      Maybe a compromise would be Expand on Hover (only if Option is held)?

                                      • Vlad replied to this.

                                          olivec

                                          but if I agreed with all of Apple's design decisions I would just use Safari.

                                          Orion respects HIG like Safari, but also has a lot of features that Safari lacks because it is clear that for Apple web is not a first grade citizen (apps are).

                                              olivec Btw double click the sidebar edge will toggle between the two widths.

                                                  ForumNinja404 I agree it looks cool, but the tough part about that is the click to mute feature - What would you click, and what would the muted version look like? At least for the other ones (with the speaker icon) it's straightforward in that you click the little speaker and the muted speaker icon remains the same as normal tabs.

                                                      2 months later

                                                      Vlad Isn't the mac setting to show/expand dock on hover an example of it being used? It's also present in Stage Manager, where if your window takes the entire screen you need to hover your mouse close to the left edge to reveal it.

                                                        i use the side bar a lot, however, at it's smallest it still takes up a lot of space, what i would like is a feature to be able to turn the side bar into just icons, removing the text, which would look something like vivaldi's tool bar.