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Thanks for your reply @gaelle . I'm sorry for responding so late, but I only saw the second response mail, the first must've gotten lost in some spam filter.
Sometimes I'm just too comfortable with the status quo to be enthusiastic about a new feature, but I do try to be open to new methods that help improve my work-flow. Vivaldi definitely has some highlights there, like the entire Quick Commands concept.
I'm not quite the vim nerd some people are, but when you use the keyboard all day, it soon becomes evident how tedious it is having to use the mouse all the time for a only short click or two. That's why I love using the Tree Style Tab Firefox extension so much, because it offers 38 shortcuts that help with tab management. Not all are obviously essential (to me), but several are very helpful in my day-to-day work. Here's a short list of the ones I use frequently, to give you an idea what I mean:
Close/Reload this tree: closes or reloads (two distinct shortcuts) all tabs in the current tree. Helps with cleanup and/or by refreshing the pages when I'm testing something.
Close/Reload descendants: same as above, but applies only to child tabs of the current one.
Close other tabs except this tree: the most important tab management shortcut for me, as I keep opening tabs and notice that I don't need all the rest any more.
Scroll tabs to top/end: ability to scroll all open tabs to top or end.
Scroll tabs up/down by page: same as above, but instead of simulating the Pos1/End keys, these shortcuts simulate Page Up/Page Down on all tabs.
To come back to your question, no the tree layout isn't absolutely essential. I only asked for this feature, because in all my search I haven't found a different way that doesn't hurt my work-flow, or make it more efficient. If better sessions integration into the Window panel will be that killer feature, I'm very interested in giving it a try.
Until then, the Window panel isn't good enough (on its own). I guess the single level of tab stacks/grouped tabs isn't really the problem, but if there's no way to properly manage tabs quickly with the help of keyboard shortcuts, the lack of a tree (no descendant tabs, no way to create tab stack automatically by opening a link in a new tab, etc) can only hurt, as it adds a lot of extra mouse clicks to get the same result. Edit: Ignore what I said about no way to create tab stacks from related new tabs. That does work, I merely forgot to configure my browser correctly
I would already be helped massively by getting two shortcuts to "close all tabs except in the current tab stack" and "close (all tabs in the) current tab stack". At present, keyboard interaction with Vivaldi is great, but definitely lacking when it comes to tab stack management.
@Motionshot The side-panels are awesome, yes. I did try some other extensions from the Chrome extension store like Sidewise and they do largely work. What they don't do is hold a candle to TST
That said, I'm somewhat curious. Does Vivaldi's WebExtensions API match that of Chrome or does it offer extra API calls (for example for tab stacking) like Firefox or Opera do? If there's no explicit API for it, does an extension know if a tab is part of a stacked group of tabs and what others are in the same group? I'm not sure if I want to go to the trouble, but if the stacking core feature could be supplemented by an extension that provides shortcuts for certain commands, I would certainly be interested in that.