Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them

Google Chrome is getting two new features, both of which are very welcome and largely long overdue. The first is A Reading modewhich does what most other browsers already do: removes a lot of website elements to make pages easier to read. Reading mode is good, you should use it, a lot of sites are bad. The second feature is the big one: vertical tabs. Instead of having all your tabs in a row at the top of your browser, you can now right-click on the tab bar and select “Show tabs vertically” to show them in a sidebar instead.

Vertical tabs aren’t a new idea for browsers — the original Chrome team even tested them, before deciding that placing tabs at the top made each tab look like an app. Glenn Murphy, the team’s original designer, said: Interview last year He saw tabs as “the equivalent of a window’s title bar—a detachable, grouped top element that contains and separates each page and toolbar.” Chrome stuck with this logic and design for many years after that.

After all this time, Chrome has executed the idea well. When you switch to vertical tabs, Chrome’s address bar moves to the top row of the app, making the interface take up much less space than before. If you’re really into minimalism, you can shrink the sidebar to show just your website’s favicons, and suddenly Chrome is completely out of the way.

(I say almost because Google could have gone further here. Over the past few years, browser after browser has copied the design that… The browser company embedded in Arcwhich has a left sidebar that also includes your bookmarks and address bar. It looks better, and frees up more space. Because Google is Google, Chrome isn’t likely to take the search bar — a gateway to the incredibly profitable search engine, and a product integration so powerful that it’s become a core part of the antitrust experience in search — out of focus.)

All of this means that vertical tabs are better and you should use them. It’s a simple matter of screen real estate. Almost every modern computer monitor is a widescreen monitor, meaning it is wider than it is tall. Meanwhile, websites and web apps are always vertical experiences. Whether you’re using a 13-inch laptop or a massive 32-inch monitor, space from top to bottom of your computer is more valuable than space from left to right.

Moving tabs to the side also makes them much easier to manage. If I load 12 tabs on my 13-inch MacBook Air, I can see about three letters from each tab’s title; If I load 25 all I can see are favicons. With vertical tabs turned on, I can see the full address of 23 tabs at a time, with the other two just a small swipe away. The more I embrace vertical tabs, the more I appreciate how easy it is to find the tab I’m looking for, and quickly close tabs I don’t want anymore. There’s no need to wonder which of the 12 tabs containing the Google Docs icon is actually the document I need, because all the names are there.

Vertical tabs also make it easier to work with tab groups, which is another power user favorite. Now you can keep a few groups, each expanding and contracting in place without usurping all the space you need for fleeting tabs.

The other reason to switch to vertical tabs is that they make your browser work like other programs you use. For better or worse, most apps seem to have gotten around to the idea of ​​having a sidebar on the left to navigate through your stuff, and then a main window for your content. There are a few solutions, most notably the Microsoft Office suite and Google Workspace, both of which still favor a horizontal toolbar at the top of the page, but I’m not sure I’d call either of those paradigms of modern software design. Most modern software, from Notion to Slack to Canva, has long embraced the sidebar. Since our browsers are now primarily just windows through which we access web applications, it makes sense that they would look and function the same way.

The good news here is that you don’t have to take my word for it. Switching browsers is difficult, and you probably don’t want to do it with vertical tabs only. But refresh Chrome, right-click the tab bar, and see what happens when Show Tabs Vertically is selected. I bet you’ll never come back.