I tried switching back to Firefox to take advantage of their multi account containers, but there were a couple of UX things that kept me from sticking with it:
- still no way to remap Ctrl+T to open a new tab in the current container context
- lack of native tab grouping, meaning that it works with plugins like OneTab
- vertical tabs that play nicely (meaning integrates nicely so that the UX feels good) with some sort of separation feature, for example, tab groups, workspaces, profiles, etc. Leaving this up to extensions seems to lead to a suboptimal experience here.
Very willing to try suggestions as I’ve spent days testing every other browser to compare (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Floorp, Orion, etc) with Safari being my current default. Surprisingly, Edge has the nicest vertical tab implementation so far.
Sidebery has a form of Tab Groups called panels (see: https://imgur.com/Za9lwej) that are built into the functionality. I also have just found Sidebery to work a little better than any of the alternatives. But they're not too far apart.
Yup, tried sideberry, tree style tabs, and simple tab groups since I think there was a Mozilla page they suggested those three. None of them felt as usable as native tab groups in any of the other browsers that support tab groups (or workspaces, profiles, or whatever else their approximate implementation is). Especially in terms of interactions with other tab-related extensions. Part of the problem with having that be a non-native feature.
That's kind of the opposite of my experience. Can't leave Sidebery, it's so well integrated and usable when combined with a couple userchrome.css tweaks that any other browser simply feels subpar to that; not nearly the same attention to detail.
Do you have links to the userchrome tweaks that you use? I hear that mentioned a lot as a way to make sideberry better. IMO, the default for sideberry isn’t good. The few tweaks that weren’t outdated made things a bit better, but nothing really hit the mark. Like I said above, very willing to give suggestions a try.
edit: my main worry with relying on userchrome tweaks is things falling out-of-date or abandoned. I saw this a lot in my testing.
I only hide the main tab bar and sidebar header, both tweaks are copied verbatim from [0] (which is linked from the sidebery github readme) and the size of the window buttons block is corrected manually in a var.
Yes, tweaks going out of date was also my concern, but they're already a few years old and nothing broke so far. I reckon I could just adapt them if anything breaks, they're easy.
I don't have a solution for the Ctrl+T issue. I use mainly the default container as with First Party Isolation I don't need to use containers beside some specific use case (multiple accounts), otherwise I put things in containers strictly for the thing like banking.
For the latter I would recommend Simple Tab Groups. It also has a sidebar which I like very much. I understand it may not be the thing you are looking for, but there are a lot of things you will not get anywhere.
Sideberry extension gives you a lot of what you're looking for. You can have separate tab panels for each container, and a keybinding (ctrl+space by default iirc) that opens a new tab in the current panel and the current container.
Sidebery has been "good enough" for me to transition from Edge back to Firefox, but I wish you could put your Tab Groups into a named folder vs. just having some tabs nested under a "parent tab".
Yup, those would also be great UX improvements. Firefox used to have something like “Show tab overview”. I think it was called Panorama? I might try looking for it to see if it still exists and works.
edit: the problem with relying on extensions for all of this is that it’s not cohesive. I found that to be the main problem with Firefox that makes me put it a tier lower than everything else right now.
- still no way to remap Ctrl+T to open a new tab in the current container context
- lack of native tab grouping, meaning that it works with plugins like OneTab
- vertical tabs that play nicely (meaning integrates nicely so that the UX feels good) with some sort of separation feature, for example, tab groups, workspaces, profiles, etc. Leaving this up to extensions seems to lead to a suboptimal experience here.
Very willing to try suggestions as I’ve spent days testing every other browser to compare (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Arc, Floorp, Orion, etc) with Safari being my current default. Surprisingly, Edge has the nicest vertical tab implementation so far.