Display the tabs on a left panel like Edge

Hello. I experienced the Edge browser’s new “vertical tabs” feature. I found it pretty neat. It allows you to display all tabs in a left pane. The tabs are now just a list on the left instead of a clogged bar at the top of the screen. Chrome does not have it, only Edge as far as I know. It would be wonderful if Brave could implement it.

In Edge, it can be turned on in “Settings > Appearance > Show vertical tabs for all current browser windows”.

It has several cool advantages:

  1. Now, when you have many (like 15+) tabs open, you still have a readable rendition of each tab title, because the tabs are listed vertically and as a result, the text is not truncated as more and more tabs are opened.

  2. You can have a longer list of tabs displayed at once, because each one only occupies one line of text.

  3. Now you have reclaimed some space height-wise, allowing you to display more page content. As a matter of fact, you generally don’t need that much width when browsing on personal computers and big screens, so it makes a lot of sense to use some of that width and display the tab list vertically.

As a side note, in case you still need the space, you can unpin the whole pane, so to reduce it to just one vertical bar of icons. On mouse-over the full tab titles display again. Besides, you can also resize its width at will.

  1. Combined with tab collections (which Brave already has), it makes it a very powerful set of features to manage many tabs in a very practical way. With Edge, you don’t feel overwhelmed anymore when working with dozens and dozens of tabs. You just put your tabs in collections and collapse them at will. It is a game-changer in my view! This is not so practical in Brave, because the collection titles still use some space on the horizontal bar, limiting the number you can create without having to scroll left and right all the time.

In conclusion, I really love this “vertical tabs” feature in Edge. I also love how Brave handles my privacy, ad content, and many other features. It would just be wonderful to have the best of the two worlds!

Could a similar feature possibly be implemented in a future release?

Cheers.

This feature is currently being implemented (work-in-progress) and it already works really great in the latest official build (Brave version 1.47.186 Chromium version 109.0.5414.119).

You need to enable it via the flags (brave://flags/#brave-vertical-tabs) since it is still in Beta and then right-click on a tab to finally enable it in the UI after restarting the browser.

Have fun!

Edit: Updated the mentioned versions.

They are doing this! If you’re feeling “brave” (ha!) download the Nightly build and test it out. It will come to the regular Brave browser at some point in the future.

Be aware that the experimental vertical tabs available in the main release of Brave is not what the final product will look like. It will get better. Like I mentioned, the Nightly build is further along and shows how this feature is developing. Tab grouping works in vertical tabs, but it will also improve in future updates.