This has nothing to do with books. It just interests me. You have been warned and can stop reading if you’re not interested.
I use Edge as a browser (mostly; I still use Chrome for Google maps and translate). Recently, they added a new feature: vertical tabs. So, questions:
- Is anyone using them?
- Why?
- What’s the point?
The last one may need clarification. I tried out vertical tabs. For those unaware, this takes the tabs out of the title bar and puts them in a vertical strip down the right side of the window. So, what this does is make the viewing window for your web page smaller. As far as I can tell, you gain nothing. Can anyone tell me why you would want to use this feature? I just can’t see it. With the tabs in the title bar they effectively take up no space. Is it to do with wanting several hundred tabs open at once? Help!
Witches and Ray-Guns 
I wondered the same.
At least it’s not just me.
I don’t use them (or Edge) but I can think of two possible benefits:
1) They can have a larger horizontal area for displaying page titles, without impacting how many tabs you can have on the screen at the same time, using screen real-estate that most pages don’t actually use.
2) You can use the scroll wheel on the mouse to scroll through them without doing anything weird.
I’m of the opinion that if you need the scroll wheel, you have too many tabs open, but valid points. Maybe I use more pages which actually use all the available screen area.
I also just noticed that you can collapse the display down to icons which then expand when you hover over them. That’s more acceptable.
Many web pages still use a fixed size and only occupy a part of the screen whilest the rest of the screen may be blank or used for advertising.
– for example in fullscreen mode – without zoom – your page here covers only 50% of the width of my screen, thus the tabs do not use any relevant space.
– I just checked several other blogs and goodreads and many limit the width of their page
I agree on the blogs. Gmail can spare some space. But, for example, ArtStation uses as much screen real estate as it can get. Amazon is more or less the same.
I checked, I can open 32Tabs on top without scrolling buttons but there is not much readable text available. And 35 on the left.
I know enought people who are unable to close a tab because they might not find the content again – even bookmarks don’t help. It might be a boon for them.
The top icon on the left can also be used to switch the tabs from left to top and return – thus I might give the a try.
Its funny how one ignores something until its mentioned –
I checked the pages used in the last few hours, and I believe over 80% of the pages I visited only use a partial screen for the main content. Beside the blogs there are many newspapers, public-service broadcasting companies or general information pages covering up to 2/3 of the width. Even amazon search results only cover 2/3 page width, but it depends how one enters a page.
While the content covers only partial pages many of these have header and footer covering the full width – so the partial cover is sometimes not evident immediately.
And I agree there are enough pages like e-mail, helth/insurrance, tv-programms, maps, art, software development etc… using real full size pages thus left tabs might somtimes be inconvenient.
For today I had a maximum of 6 Pages open concurrently, using half the top line for tabs. The only time I am opening more of them consciously, is once a week when I open all my tabs in a folder for amazon searches on authors (something about 25 tabs) ordered by publication date. Normally tabs are filled/completed in order of opening – even if I open all 25 at once. Closing any tab as quick as possible if there is no change detetected, really leads to not many open tabs remaining and no need for that many tabs.
I have not used it, but I think that is for those that have the ultrawide monitors and want more vertical real estate on the screen
This was my first thought as someone who uses an ultrawide monitor. I already flip the Windows taskbar to the left side of my screen for a little extra vertical space, so adding in the space from browser tabs as well actually ads up to a decent amount between the two. Its just to bad I hate Edge and refuse to use it.
I’m with Christoph; there are a lot of sites that don’t fill the width of a screen. That includes basically all social media sites, some number of WordPress-driven content sites, a number of government sites, sites like Arstechnica, etc. The browser I’m typing this in has 24 tabs open and of them all only Gmail uses the full width of my 28″ 4K monitor and Gmail uses it poorly.
Also, many sites eat up vertical screen by retaining headers and ad banners. I’ve literally come across sites where only about a third of the vertical viewing area is actually available for content. Yeah, I abandon those.
For all of those reasons – which yes entirely boil down to poor UX design – losing some unused or poorly used width is an easy tradeoff to gain a sliver more height. The only other way to mitigate it is to use a portrait orientation monitor, which I do for 1 of the 4 displays on my desk.
For the record, I rarely have more than six tabs open at once. I have four as standard and then add extra ones as I’m researching something. Maybe this is why I’m not that bothered about this.
You haven’t lost anything. This is my point, it’s psychological. Edge still has a title bar, which is where the tabs reside, so you don’t gain any vertical space.
And here I was expecting a discussion of control-K …