Implement Tree-style Tabs

barbudo2005

Try also Sideberry and compare.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sidebery/?utm_content=addons-manager-reviews-link&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_source=firefox-browser

https://github.com/mbnuqw/sidebery

guigirl

@barbudo2005 Absolutely!

TST is wonderful
S is superb

Kunjan

For Vivaldi Devs: I agree. For me the following (in addition) would be most helpful:

the ability to label each stack grouping would be really helpful e.g. Project A
using colours makes it much faster for users to view a specific tab
a tab session backup function that automatically backs up windows>tab groups>tabs every 15 minutes (interval set by user) and upto last 4 weeks (time interval set by user) sessions to be kept.
sync the sessions
above all make it easy to see the tabs
finally, the same functionality to ba avilable in both vertical tab panes and horizontal tab panes

thx.

Kunjan

@barbudo2005 I have tried both, however i have run into issues on occassion. As this is core functionality, ideally it should be built into Vivaldi. Also, this is for FireFox and not Chrome based Vivaldi.

Pesala

@Kunjan None of your points are related to this topic.

Tab stacks can already be renamed
Vote for Rename Tabs
Vote for Sync saved sessions
Vote for Color for groups of tabs
Vote for Color a Single Tab (or Tab Group
Vote for Keep multiple backups of sessions / bookmarks / notes

Kunjan

@Pesala Thanks for the update.

I did not realize that open could rename tab stacks. However I see now that a long press on a tab stack opens a second tab panel (vertical panes). This results in an awful waste of space resulting in a squeezed webpage and/or too wide a tab pane. A far better solution would be a tree or outline style expansion.

Regarding the other points I have voted where it made sense to me.

Thank you.

Kunjan

I feel its important to be able to add labels to tab stacks. Here's en example from Microsoft Edge. Also the 2nd level tree thingy...does not work with vertical layouts.

rarach

Reviving this thread.
I can "use" the current Window Panel solution, however a deeper tree-like feature would be beneficial. It looks like it is made for a tree-like view, so adding one or two more levels, would probably not hurt the side bar.
However, I realise, that implementing a deeper tree would mean to also add this option to tab stacking at some point. Maybe an option to two level tab stacking, which would enable more deeper tab-stacks and thus a more tree-like structure in the Window Panel would be the way to go.
Anyway, I hope this will be added at some point, currently the Window Panel seems like it has a lot of potential for power users, but is not really utilised at the moment.

mohamadyahia

Edge style tab groups is the biggest feature I'm missing with vivaldi sadly.
Really loved a lot of things about this browser but my tabs are so much more organized in edge vs in Vivaldi (even when using accordion tab stacks). So I'm going back to Edge because of this.

Edge tab groups:

vs Vivaldi's tab stacks:

Please give us the option to have this!

rarach

@mohamadyahia You can rename your tab stacks when using the window panel and then they are named however you like

le_bro

Look how this was implemented in the outdated Sidewise Tree Style Tabs extension and make similar. Nowadays there's nothing comparable in terms of usability. Everything I saw is a joke except Sidewise. Too bad Sidewise isn't usable in Vivaldi (yes, you can add it in side panel, but it's very unstable and glitchy, it was originally made for Chrome and was abandoned by it's author Joel Thornton. Though it's now opensourced under FOSS license). Seriosly, Vivaldi browser + working Sidewise could be everything any power user or "Tab Hoarder" could dream of.

TheAMan006

@le_bro Does anyone know if either of the Sidewise/Sideberry or Tree-Style-Tabs extensions still work in Firefox? Saw a very frustrated Firefox user in some forum thread today, saying how Firefox was removing features in the name of unification and pushing workflows they deem modern onto the users... Switching to Firefox would be scary, seems.

ybjrepnfr

@TheAMan006 said in Implement Tree-style Tabs:

Sideberry or Tree-Style-Tabs extensions still work in Firefox?

both still work fine in ff. both are good, albeit imo sidebery in particular is terrific.

tst dev, a few years ago, decided to remove several aspects of core functionality from tst itself, & instead redeploy them in numerous individual "child" extensions, made by them or 3rd-parties. thus, in order for a user to still have the full gamut of features, they must now not only install tst itself, but also a bewildering array of associated extensions, some of whose names are far from intuitive. once the user masters all this, the "tst collective" still performs well, but imo it's now rather a confusing mess. what presumably became less maintenance for the dev has become a significant usability mess for the user.

otoh, sidebery has all the core functionality of tst & many of its child extensions, all bundled together in the one extension, + various other great functions not available in tst... or vivaldi . its settings page in particular is magnificently atomic, giving users finely granular control of functions & appearance.

allegedly.

TheAMan006

@ybjrepnfr Timely reply buddy; I had just finished installing Firefox and indeed, TST is awesome, and I installed one of those TST child extensions too which you were talking about; it basically decreases the opacity of older tabs, using the MRU (Most Recently Used Tabs) list of Firefox. Tap To Tab extension works; it enables double click to open new tab in foreground. Tab Slider exists over there too, and sorts the tabs by MRU, but both Tab Slider and TST can't be used simultaneously. I had an idea of how MRRU could be baked into TST: when user switches to any tab, drag the whole subtree up at the top. Children of the same parent stay sorted in the MRU order; the upper the more recently used one. Sadly, couldn't find a child extension for it. Still not satisfied. Quick Tabs extension is an MRU switcher, with fuzzy search. No dark mode. Hurts the eyes so damn bad. Sad I don't know how to CSS; there's a box in the options for custom CSS; me used it for width:1000, but that's pretty much it. Others' older scripts no longer work neatly... Bunch of people on YCombinator have ditched TsT altogether and purely use MRU; something I had been doing for months ever since I found the TabSlider extension... But like, Trees are so nice too; only thing I have to remember is never single click, only middle click on links; the long-press-backwards-button page navigational history is so far away. There was a dude on YCombinator who proposed for absolutely what I said about incorporating MRU in TsT, many years ago; looks like never happened. Imma try SideBery now.

EDIT: QUICKEY, another MRU extension, works great and has dark mode! Glad! Still, I'd have preferred an extension that adds an always-visible side panel that displays the MRU ordered tab list all the time, besides the Tree view. Or perhaps MRU on the new tab page. Neither one could I find any extension for...

TheAMan006

Btw, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forest-tree-style-tab-man/hbledhepdppepjnbnohiepcpcnphimdj works perfectly. I tried it on Edge, and Vivaldi, and though the in-build auto-hiding sidebar unhides on hover, it's not reliable, and you have to install this dude's external companion app, and sign up to his website with Google, and the extension collects (for inapp purchases i'm guessing but whatever) credit card numbers lol. So yeah. Not fun.

aashish108

I was thinking that the new Workspaces features adds another layer of organisation to tabs. So tree tabs is not as important now, for me anyway

Still a nice to have for choice.

fredless

lots of great ideas swirling in here, but not much in the way of details as to whether the need to significantly improve the current vertical tab implementation is really registering with the product team. anyone?

ybjrepnfr

@fredless hoping, & happy, to be entirely wrong here, but tbh i believe vivaldi devs, & jon, have no interest in incorporating full-functionality * vertical tabs [* ie, per TreeStyleTab & the even better Sidebery firefox addons]. indeed, in recent years when a previous forum member engaged jon in an attempted discussion about it, he seemed completely unaware of those addons... & hence then by definition, the massive function+feature advantages they have over vivaldi's native vertical tab options [whose one advantage over those two competitors remains the nice tab thumbnails on hover feature]. furthermore, also in previous years, many [short- & long-term] forum members also vociferously defended "the vivaldi way" of tabs management against all the infidels & imposters [my histrionics, but their underlying sentiments]. incredibly, many of these peeps were also unaware of those addons, &/or some then doubled-down on their dubious rebuttals by asinine bleats like "i only use one or two tabs at once, ipso facto nobody else has any decent business needing more complex tabs management either". ergo, with the devs & owner apparently unaware & disinterested, & a chunk of the forum-posting user-base ditto, i see little reason for optimism here.

fredless

@ybjrepnfr I didn't mean to imply and don't think that vertical (or horizontal) tabs are completely off here - there is a LOT of value with tab management you don't get in other Chromium browsers. Chasing multiple extensions and CSS customizations in FF isn't everyone's cup of tea either, and nor is FF itself.

But the one thing that a few other Chromium browsers do quite well here is around their approach to enabling a hierarchy\tree\forest UI: being able to clearly distinguish (and work with!) the parent-child relationship between tabs. Whether you are browsing for work or play, I think for many there is a tendency for a bottomless set of linked or related pages - with the opening of a number of subtabs to pursue related information\tasks very common for many workflows, repeating over and over. Being able to efficiently visualize/collapse/prune across multiple levels of this hierarchy is of very high value to me as I expect it would be for a significant majority of others - and we don't have a view\option to accomplish this in Vivaldi right now. I've been trying to live within tab stacks, which are okay-but-not-great for a bare bones 2-level hierarchy; but I commonly need 3+ levels. A simple hierarchy that, for me, happens multiple times an hour:

email client open perhaps to some newsfeed email
- linked article #1 from said email
  - some linked topic within article
  - a sidesearch based on something I wanted to understand better around the article
    - search result #1
    - search result #2
  - exploring a purchase with an online retailer related to thoughts spurred by all of the above

When I am done for the moment with that article, I want to be able to put it away - i.e. collapse the branch. When I want to go back and find all of the work I did, I want to be able to visually see it sitting right where I left it, nested and collapsed under my email client tab. When I am done with the whole line of thought forever (because my money is better off in my wallet), I want to be able to just prune the whole branch in a single click\close of the article tab. In Vivaldi, all of this can be lumped into a tab stack and mentally managed, but things then quickly get muddled the moment I move on to say, article #2 and I begin to get lost trying to find my way back to what should be a "branch" later.

ybjrepnfr

@fredless said in Implement Tree-style Tabs:

the one thing that a few other Chromium browsers do quite well here is around their approach to enabling a hierarchy\tree\forest UI: being able to clearly distinguish (and work with!) the parent-child relationship between tabs

please name these "other Chromium browsers". when i last looked, vertical tabs in edge & [now newly in] brave, had NO tab-stack nesting capability [which is the behaviour you described, & which is one of the massive strengths of the ff addons i listed; infinite nesting]. chrome/chromium afaik still have no native vertical tabs at all of any nature, so are worthy of no further consideration here.

vivaldi's tab management remains distinctly superior to all the chromium-browser "pretenders" i've tested. however, once anyone who routinely works with myriad opened tabs simultaneously, has made the "mistake" of trying TreeStyleTab &/or Sidebery in firefox, & thus realised the power of their infinite nesting that supports complex hierarchies of [when necessary] great-great-great-great-etc-grandparents to parent-child-child-child cousins aunts uncles etc arrangements, one then finds vivaldi's capability inadequate by comparison.

tl;dr: I do not understand your post. you seemed to misinterpret my post as valorising ff & rubbishing vivaldi, then you explained to me the value of infinite nesting which is THE central point of those excellent ff addons i mentioned, & which ipso facto i'm well aware of already coz that's why i bothered to mention them. in fact, my point is that vivaldi's tab management would become THE best across ALL browsers if they would only incorporate such finessed nesting control. so far, alas, publicly they've given no support for any such improvement. i wrote my post, not to beat some p/r drum for ff, but to explain vivaldi's need for improvement.