Why You Should Be Using Vertical Tabs in Your Browser

Every major browser puts a thin strip of tabs at the top of the window. It's great, until you open dozens of tabs, and all you can really see are little website favicons. A better way exists—placing tabs vertically in a sidebar—but browsers have been resisting it for years. Arc was the first mainstream browser that pioneered a sidebar-based navigation system , and since then it has propagated to Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Arc's spiritual successor, Zen browser. If you're using one of these browsers, I highly recommend making the switch. Why vertical tabs make more sense So much wasted space on the left and right. Credit: Khamosh Pathak As The Verge notes , most websites are customized for a vertical reading experience, while laptops and desktops have widescreen displays. When you read articles on a website like Lifehacker, there's quite a lot of white space on the left and the right, while that vertical space is actually at a premium. Depending on your display size, your tabs might end up crunched along the top of the display, space that would otherwise be available for viewing the site in question. Moving the tab bar to a sidebar means you've freed up some useful space up top, with the added advantage of being able to see the names of all your tabs—even if you have 30 tabs open at once. How to enable vertical tabs in Google Chrome Credit: Khamosh Pathak Chrome was the last major browser to add support for vertical tabs, introducing the feature in April 2026…