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I hope OP does not mind, but I’m looking for the exact same thing and only Arc does it this way. See the following video:

  1. Normal/temporary/default tabs are on the bottom
  2. Above them are pinned tabs, which persist and cannot be closed, but otherwise act just like normal tabs. You can navigate inside of them, but can always return to their pinned URL, which "resets" them.
  3. Favorite tabs are at the top, as minimized icons (similar to pinned tabs in Orion)

Both normal tabs and pinned tabs can be grouped in folders – real folders whose function is to collapse/expand multiple tabs and which do not open a webpage. This is in contract to the first tab in a group/folder/stack acting as the "folder", which is currently the case in Orion and other browsers.

The important part is that pinned tabs are permanent and cannot be easily closed/removed, like bookmarks (you can right-click and remove them, but not close them with a keyboard shortcut). But in contrast to bookmarks, they ARE the tabs and do not open new tabs, which would just pollute the tab bar with a lot of new tabs when using the bookmarks constantly. If you navigate away inside of a pinned tab and the URL is on the same domain, a "Back to pinned URL" button appears which "resets" the pinned tab to the URL it was pinned to.

Orion has pinned tabs, but they appear as small icons without text, which is not viable if I want to make multiple tabs with the same favicon permanent. Also, without being able to group in folders, pinning is unfortunately not an alternative to old-school bookmarks. The folders in Arc can be nested infinitely, which makes them fully-fledged "bookmarks".

There was a topic on the forums where you presented a UX study about grouping tabs, which I also found really good, but it seemed to be put on hold. This in combination with OPs feature request would make Orion an instant replacement for Arc for me.

  • Vlad replied to this.

    Thank you @jannisborgers for illustrating my point and providing a video!

    It is exactly as @jannisborgers has pointed out. Orion's pinned tabs are a bit different to what I had in mind.
    @Vlad the links you provided I feel like is similar but also touching on the whole design of the vertical bar again, hence creating confusion as thats a wider discussion.

    I believe what people appreciate about Arcs approach on tabs, as @jannisborgers mentioned, is the 3 stages of tabs that they have in one place neatly and intuitively displayed.
    Normal tabs, their pinned tabs which act as a normal browsers bookmarks with added functionality, and their favourite tabs which act as constants and favicon across all spaces at the very top.

    Im not particularly fussy on how they look and whether they should be bigger, id leave that to the design team to keep it coherent to Orion's design language.
    I was more so suggesting to have the bookmarks bar act as pinned tabs.

    Right now, if I click on any of my bookmarks in the bookmark bar, it opens a new tab or replaces the website I am on (depending on the setting configuration). I would like it to function as a pinned tab just as is shown in @jannisborgers video. Clicking on them whilst on another website will not replace the website I am on, but just take me to that pinned tab/bookmark. I can then close that pinned bookmark without it deleting the bookmark/tab from my bookmarks bar/folder.

    Adding folders and bookmarks to the vertical bar is a different feature request that was raised and you provided a UX mock up as @jannisborgers mentioned, which I am also a fan of and hope to see that further developed.

    • Vlad replied to this.

      Niko

      I believe what people appreciate about Arcs approach on tabs

      My understanding is that for the subset of users who like Arc's opinionated approach to tabs, they really love it. But for vast majority of users who tried it, it does not resonate, which is probably why Arc is pivoting all the time.

      We want to entertain all good ideas, so this is why I am trying to understand the building blocks of such user experience. One thing to understand when describing features is none of us are Arc users so we do not know where you are coming from. The ideas need to be described in a way that help us get from where Orion is to where we want Orion to be, while continuing to serve and benefit all Orion users.

      A successful feature suggestion post explains (in detail if possible) a single feature to be added to Orion. If there are multiple features they need to be broken down to multiple posts.

      Here is what we are tracking:

      I referenced those posts as it appeared to me the closest to what is being asked for here.

      So my ask would be if the feature suggestion you ar advocating for is not captured in those two linked posts, to express it in clear and simple language, with screnshots/mockups/videos if possible.

          Merged 6 posts from Bookmark tabs to act as optional pinned tabs.
            Vlad changed the title to Larger icon/show title for pinned tabs in sidebar + Favorites in sidebar .

              Vlad Fair enough.
              I will try and get my point across as simply as possible.

              Feature proposal: Bookmarks as Pinned Tabs

              Purpose:
              Allow bookmarks in the bookmarks bar to act as pinned tabs, staying in place and highlighted when open (in addition to pinned tabs in the vertical bar).

              Details:
              Bookmarks as pinned tabs in bookmarks bar: Clicking one opens the webpage directly, acting like a pinned tab. It does not open them in new tabs as it is currently.

              Highlight Active Bookmarks: The opened (pinned) bookmark in the bookmarks bar is highlighted to show it’s active.

              Close Option on Hover: Hovering over an active bookmark in the bookmarks bar reveals an “X” button. Clicking it closes the webpage, removes the highlight, but leaves the bookmark in place.

              Benefits:
              Reduces Tab Clutter by preventing duplicate tabs.
              Efficient Navigation by clearly marking which bookmarks are currently active.

              Forgive me, I am unable to illustrate with video and I dont know how to use Figma. Hopefully someone else can provide that.

                  Vlad I hear you. For me, there is a real elegance to having it all vertically. As a use metaphor, I never think of them as bookmarks (even though they are). I create a tab...and then say to myself "this is a tab that in my 'work' space I will need to use a lot." Then, I simply drag it vertically above the horizontal rule that divides the vertical space. The tab remains open, but is now permanent. If I click the x, it closes but remains bookmarked in place. If I click again (now it is a - ), it is removed. A horizontal bookmark bar feels clunky to me personally. To really manage the bookmarks in the horizontal bar with ease, you need to open the bookmarks and drag them around. In Arc's vertica way....opened tabs just become bookmarks because you chose to make them 'permanent'...no need to think of them as anything different or have another organizational scheme...just drag above horizontal rule, and bam. Want to sort them? Just drag them around at will.

                    For those not familiar with the Arc workflow...here is an example of how the tabs/permanent-bookmarked-tabs works. For me these aer much better than pinned tabs as icons (which Arc also has)/

                      Niko

                      Thanks! I gave it a go with the following prototype and a written concept:

                      Proposed changes:

                      1. Vertical tab bar is divided into three sections:
                        • Favorites
                        • Bookmarks
                        • Normal tabs
                      2. Bookmarks and normal tabs can be grouped in folders
                      3. Bookmarks are permanent and persist across sessions and application restarts
                      4. Clicking a bookmarks turns the bookmark into a tab, in place (not opening new tab).
                      5. Navigating inside of a bookmark reveals "reset" icon/button, which resets the URL to the one that was bookmarked, and navigates back to that URL.

                      Not shown:

                      1. Dragging a tab to the bookmark list turns that tab into a bookmark
                      2. Dragging a bookmarked tab to the normal tabs removes the bookmark
                      3. Favorites work the same as now
                        • Making favorites a little bigger seems like a good idea, given that they are meant to be used very regularly.
                      4. All of the above is saved per profile, so you can have different favorites, bookmarks and tabs per profile.
                      5. Renaming tabs is also not shown, but further improves the concept so that bookmarks act as truly permanent tabs and can be customized fully. I suggest a context menu option and shortcut, and/or double-clicking the tab label. This functionality would need to exist for tab folders as well.

                      Similarities between tabs and bookmarks

                      • Bookmarks work like regular tabs: They show the saved URL directly and are marked as selected

                      Differences between tabs and bookmarks

                      • Bookmarks cannot be closed directly and have to be manually removed (context-menu or dragging out of bookmarks, see below)
                      • Bookmarks remember the URL that they were saved with. When the user navigates away from the bookmarked URL inside of the bookmarked tab, the change is indicated and the user can undo the change, so that they can return to the original bookmarks state.
                      • If a link in a bookmarked page leads outside the bookmarked domain, it should open inside of a new "normal" tab (not sure about that, but it makes more sense than not doing it).

                      Additional challenges

                      • There should be keyboard shortcuts for all the actions above, if applicable
                      • There should be context-menu options for all the actions above, if applicable
                      • This functionality has to work with horizontal tabs. I can picture a UI where the drag-and-drop functionality (as well as shortcuts and context-menu options) could be applied to horizontal tabs as well, given that the tab bar and the bookmark bar are close enough to make dragging-and-dropping possible.
                      • When using horizontal tabs, folders in both the bookmark bar and the tab bar cannot be tabs, and clicking them would have to open a dropdown with the tabs, instead of changing the main viewport. (This is why I think the folder request is a blocker for the bookmarks-as-tabs request, if bookmarks-as-tabs should ever be reality).

                      Other changes

                      Selected tab styling

                      I also made some changes to the way the currently selected tab is styled. This is not essential, totally secondary, but I think it helps distinguishing selected and hovered tabs, as well as folders.

                      Profile selector styling

                      Profiles in this concept get a color in addition to the icon (I used emojis to save time). This way you can easily see which profile you're using. While I’m sure that the styling can be further improved, this serves the same purpose as Arc’s full-on background color, but in a more subtle way. Profiles should help isolate browsing data. And because user error is the most common problem in this functionality (accidentally opening a URL in the wrong profile), I think this change is more than just cosmetic.

                      Motivation

                      @Vlad I’m very grateful you’re listening to these requests at all, and I feel like I need to justify the concept:

                      I agree that the way Arc realized the same concept did not feel native. I also agree that this alienated the majority of users because the mental jump needed was too big.

                      What I do not agree with is that this is an unsolvable obstacle. My hunch is that most people don’t bookmark URLs at all and just use tabs as throwaway resources to remember content. This leads to tab-hoarding. Using traditional bookmarks on the other hand requires context-shifting from bookmarks to tabs, and then STILL clutters the tab bar if people don’t actively tidy up the tabs.

                      I’ve seen some very intelligent people click around in their tab bar for a minute, constantly hit-and-missing what they are searching for in the mess of open tabs. Going vertical remedies some of that by at least showing the labels, but it does not solve the underlying issue, which is that people use two kinds of tabs:

                      • tabs they open and either close directly afterwards or forget about, cluttering the tab bar
                      • tabs they go to multiple times per session and that mostly stays at the same URL (hence the reset button in the prototype above)

                      The concept above caters to both types of tab uses without being too far off from the traditional way. I also think it would not alienate users that don’t use bookmarks or pinned tabs at all.

                          @jannisborgers @movingimage Thanks for your contributions! I would be very happy if we would get from top to bottom:

                          • Favorites: Those can be represented by a favicon. I don't care too much about the size, but I'd use them to have Readwise, Raindrop, Inoreader in every Orion 'Window'. Services I access during the day a lot.
                          • Pinned tabs and pinned tab folders below that. These are 'Window' specific (like workspaces). The pinned tabs show as a favicon with an editable name on their right side and open tabs 'in place'.
                          • And a temporary tabs section below that is also 'Window' specific. It would be great if that section would have a 'clear' clickable text button to close all open tabs execpt the active one (also courtesy of Arc).

                          I think users would be most helped of the design only shows certain parts when a user explicitly adds a tab to a section (favorite, pinned tab+folders, temp tabs) that way users can keep it as clean as they like.

                          I would also want to suggest to rename 'Windows' to 'Spaces' because when I open another Window it just shows different tabs in the same Window. So to me Spaces would be more logical.

                          The current implemementation with pinned tabs makes it hard for me to quickly open the desired tab. The small favicons are hard to differentiate when you have many. And somehow my eyes can quicker follow a top to bottom list than mutliple rows of small pinned tab favicons below each other.
                          Secondly the order is not always maintained as others have mentioned and favicons lose there image every now and then (I had it today when updating to the latest version).
                          It could be that most users might not have many pinned tabs so don't experience this as a issue.

                          While I love Orion and have purchased the Orion Plus Lifetime I have been mostly using Arc for the last period mainly because of their sidebar design. It's not perfect but makes browsing the web faster for me.
                          Not in the last place because I can swipe between different (work)Spaces when my mouse is hovering over the sidebar. This would also be a great addition to Orion: swipe between 'Saved 'Windows''.

                          I know there are discussions about adding the URL field and extensions also in the sidebar. I wouldn't mind that either but would probably focus first on the pinned tabs feature.
                          Thanks!

                            janpeeters

                            Yes. Nice and clear.

                            Arc did a bunch of clunky things (downloads, easels, extensions in odd floating windows. ai crap that I can get anywhere but don’t need to have built in, etc..)… but Arc also got a lot of things right. The “right” things were largely these small organizational things that made my browser into an organized task-oriented(spaces, persistent tabs) home base.

                            Going with Chrome was a bad call. It inherited all of chrome’s resource issues, etc…

                            I speak of arc in past tense now - if you’ve followed TBCs announcements of the past few days, it’s clear they see arc as a dead end.

                            I think that Orion has a giant opportunity here if they can inherit a couple of these key metaphors.

                              jannisborgers This looks fantastic. I have a few suggestions:

                              1. Add a way of indicating whether a Bookmark is Active, Unopened or Suspended. For Active it could be an always visible "deactivate tab" button to the right represented by a symbol, a dot, or a slight glow.
                              2. Clicking on the headings of the groups Bookmarks or Favorites, collapses the group like it does with folders
                              3. For bookmarks that are active, on hover, instead of X, to the right add an alternative button that indicates that the tab will be deactivated when it's clicked and not deleted from bookmarks. Maybe use a "-". I guess it would be displayed alongside the Reset button.
                              4. Include Reading List group, that's also collapsible. Same functionality as Bookmarks except it does shos X on hover that deactivates the tab and deletes it from Reading List on click. Reading List contents can't be grouped in folders.
                              5. It can get tedious if you have a lot of bookmarks to scroll through. Experiment with adding "Open Tab from Boomarks" button that allows you to search all bookmarks that are organized in the various folders. It could look like [🔖][_____ + _____].
                                5b. An alternative to "Open Tab from Boomarks" button would be having a small search box under the Bookmarks heading like it currently is. It could be either visible at all times or called out by clicking a magnifying glass icon next to the Bookmarks heading.
                              6. Bookmarks and Reading List groups can be disabled/hidden in Preferences
                              7. Reset functionality would be useful for Favorites too, I'm not sure if it already exists, mb if it does
                              8. If it's not already the case, the Divider is fixed in place and not moved when Bookmark Folders are expanded. Bookmarks and Reading List Groups work as windows with limited display height, basically they don't push down every group below them when their contents are a lot or expanded.
                              9. The Divider can be moved up and down with click and hold

                                  Thank you, everyone! Adding more functionality to the prototype so that the whole concept can be further enhanced would be nice. I think the basic building blocks are in place already, though. I see a couple of contributors chiming in on this and similar topics and would like to wait for general feedback from the Orion team.

                                  My thoughts on the feedback:

                                  • Collapsible sidebar sections: I like this!
                                  • Global vs. profile favorites
                                    • My solution would be that the global favorites are mixed with the profile-wide favorites, to avoid yet another section in the sidebar. Two ways to add favorite: "Add to profile favorites" and "Add to global favorites")
                                  • Different styling for active/unopened/suspended tabs and ability to manually manage suspension/active status
                                    • I don’t understand the need for this to be honest, I think the application should manage the resources for me and not have me manually manage suspending to free up memory. I‘m not even sure what suspending a tab means.
                                  • Adding the reading list
                                    • I never used reading lists personally. It feels like a use case somewhere between bookmark and normal tab, but I’m not sure why it couldn’t just be a bookmark, given that it is managed almost the same?
                                  • Adding a search input to filter bookmarks
                                    • Super useful in my opinion! I think adding at at the top and letting it filter all sections at once would add the least clutter and still accomplish the task.
                                  • Adding a setting to hide sections
                                    • Coming from a developer, feature toggles complicate UX and development because you have to consider different combinations of available features for every decision. I propose instead that these sections are hidden if empty, and only show up if at least one favorite/bookmark/reading list item has been added.
                                    • To make sure that drag and drop is available if no favorites/bookmarks/reading list items exist in the profile, maybe the sections could appear on drag start of a tab, with a empty drop target area ("Drag here to add to bookmarks", "Drag here to add to reading list", "Drag here to add as favorite", etc.). I’d have to search macOS for a "native" example of this, I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something like this done by Apple somewhere.
                                  • Reset-functionality for favorites
                                    • Given the limited space, I feel like a context-menu option is the only way for this.
                                    • Maybe favorites can automatically reset on session end, so that you start at the same point every time you open Orion?
                                  • Height limits/adjustments for sections
                                    • I feel that this adds too much UI complexity. Multiple scrolling areas can be hard to use in combination with drag and drop, especially if nested folders are used. It also breaks the macOS feel for me.

                                  Safari’s implementation

                                  I looked at Safari after Arc’s announcement, looking for other alternatives. On iOS I use Safari exclusively because it’s working great for me. I tried it on macOS and wow is that same browser buggy.

                                  Tab groups and default tabs

                                  Tab groups in Safari are kind of like bookmarks/pinned tabs in the concept above, but even if they DO work and aren’t buggy, the way that the default tabs vs. tab groups work is confusing.

                                  Multiple states of default tabs

                                  Tabs are added in the "default" tab group (named after the profile and not removable), akin to the "normal tabs" in the concept above. But if you open a tab there in one window, it does not sync with the other window that uses the same profile. So you can have multiple windows open with the same profile and have different states. Only tabs in the tab groups are synced between windows.

                                  Pinned tabs

                                  Tab groups can contain "pinned tabs", and only these pinned tabs are locked from closing, while normal tabs in tab groups CAN be closed with CMD+W.

                                  Horizontal tab bar

                                  You can’t hide the default horizontal tab bar if you have pinned tabs inside of a tab group. Unchecking View -> Always show tab bar only works in tab groups that have no pinned tabs. Otherwise, the horizontal tab bar still exists, even though the View setting is disabled.

                                  Start page

                                  This tab is always there in every tab group, and cannot be removed. It acts as a starting point for a new tab, but I don’t understand why it’s there if other tabs are already in the group.

                                  – – –

                                  As I said, I would really like to know if the Orion team would consider any of these ideas. There are a lot of bugs in Orion that (should) have higher priority. Even with my criticism for Safari above, the solution Apple provides is closer to what I’m used from Arc than what Orion delivers. And because Orion has a different focus, as per Kagi’s marketing, I’m not sure breaking with traditional tab management like Arc will ever be considered.

                                    I often pinned multiples tabs from the same website (such as multiple repositories on GitHub, for example). In such cases, showing only the favicon for the tab makes it extremely hard to differentiate them. Having an option for pinned tabs to appear as regular rows with names on the side would be a huge deal for me.

                                    Arc has two levels of pinned tabs, level one is favicons that appear at the top, and level two are tabs that appear identical to currently open but show both the title (also customisable) and the icon. I use the second level most of the time.

                                    Merged 1 post from Ability to show titles in pinned tabs.

                                      jannisborgers thanks again for your thoughts! In this thread @milos also made a nice protoype. What I especially liked is putting things like bookmarks, history and reading list in a right sidebar. I don't know if your in for collaboration, but maybe it is an idea to connect with him and join forces? You both seem to have the right mind and mindset for a new sidebar implementation.

                                      • Global vs profile favorites: I agree that another section might create clutter (not your words). But I'm wondering how we could differentiate the two types? Because what if you want to move one from global to profile or when you want to delete it but are not aware that it will be also gone in other contexts?

                                      From what you write about global vs profile I get the impression that you would go the profile way instead of the 'workspace' way. I can imagine that separate profiles are useful e.g. to separate work and private use. But I for example don't use profiles I just use one in which I have different spaces (Arc).
                                      So I would really like to also be able to separate bookmarks/tabs/favorites in one profile into sections that I would call workspaces or contexts. This prevents the need for installing the same extensions in multiple profiles. That way it's also quicker to switch between contexts because you don't have to reload the whole extension 'tree'.

                                      • Different styling for active/unopened/suspended tabs and ability to manually manage suspension/active status: I also don't see the use for it, it creates visual clutter, but in another thread where I suggested to remove all those indicators someone replied that it's useful on slower systems and slower connections. I would make this an optional.

                                      • Adding the reading list: I would place this in a right sidebar (like Vivaldi 7 does), together with history and all bookmarks and maybe a possibility to add other services like Raindrop.io, Mastodon.

                                      • Adding a setting to hide sections: I think showing a indicator when tabs are dragged to an empty section would be great.

                                      • Reset-functionality for favorites: A context menu is indeed the way to go and automatic reset on session end seems a smart approach. A context menu that says: 'Update location to current page' could also be useful. E.g. when someone wants to set a new home for that tab (e.g. 'International news' instead of 'US news' on the NYT)

                                      • Height limits/adjustments for sections: I also think it will add UX complexity.

                                      • One thing from the other thread that I mentioned is the need for
                                        1) pinned bookmark/favorite folders so that in one context you can make collapsible folders for Github, Docs and other categories and names folders and as @dhruvkb mentions below:
                                        2) name of pinned tabs/bookmarks/favorites on the right because some people store mutiple bookmarks within the same site.

                                        5 days later

                                        I agree with the other reponses regarding how Orion handles tabs, and support the Arc-style changes.

                                        I suppose the biggest complaint for me is beauty/functionality. Let's look at the difference here:

                                        This is the closest I can get Orion to look decent, but it still lacks functionality. Here’s a list of what Arc does right and Orion doesn’t:

                                        • Pinned tabs on Orion are very small, making it difficult to tell which ones are already opened or loaded. Slight dimming for unloaded tabs and larger tabs would solve this issue.
                                        • The “1 Tab” description at the top seems unnecessary and redundant.
                                        • The “Pinned Tabs” feature is also useless. I know which tabs are pinned, they haven't changed in years.
                                        • Arc creates a button to create a new tab in the “Opened Tabs” section, which allows users to infer that the following tabs are open. This offers actual functionality instead of some redundant text. We don’t need descriptions for features that we use daily.
                                        • Customizing Orion’s theme doesn’t change the vertical panel color, which is strange.
                                        • Arc has larger text compared to Orion. With my current configuration, Arc supports 20 tabs without scrolling, while Orion seems to support 30-40 tabs. How many users are actually using this space? The typical user only uses a few tabs at once. Allow the space to be usable by storing information in it. Make the text and icons bigger.