I am delighted that Brave is finally getting vertical tabs however there are some minor issues that I feel needs to be addressed.
First off, I feel like these things are the ones that are glaringly obvious that will be fixed in subsequent releases but I thought I’d add them anyway for the sake of brevity.
- Auto-expand: The collapsed vertical tab should expand on mouse hover. Brave can also offer an option to keep the tabs collapsed and only show favicon, or always expanded.
- Close button covering the favicon: In relation to the optional feature of keeping the vertical tab collapsed, I feel like the close button should only show up if the mouse hovers over the favicon.
- Resizable panel: The vertical tab panel cannot be resized whatsoever.
Now that the obvious ones are out of the way, here are some of the not-so obvious things that I feel may go overlooked.
- The title bar is still occupying space when vertical tabs are enabled. I feel like Microsoft did the right thing here for Edge by moving the window controls (minimize, maximize, close) down to the address bar level so that more vertical real estate is recovered.
- The bookmarks bar should be beside the vertical tab panel when it is not pinned. When it is set by the user to always show, it’s fine the way it is however, if the user has unchecked the “Show bookmarks” option, it only shows up in New Tab pages. The problem with the current implementation is that in this case, whenever I create a new tab, since I don’t have the bookmarks bar pinned, the whole vertical tab panel gets pushed down and the overall experience just feels janky as opposed to if it was contained inside the content section.
Finally, this one is unlikely to be implemented but I feel would elevate the vertical tab experience is if the Tab Search feature (Ctrl+Shift+A) could be merged with the vertical tab panel so you can search for tabs right then and there so that it’s not a separate popup window. So it acts sort of like a tab filter.
Sorry for the wall of text but that concludes my feedback for the new vertical tab feature. I’m excited for its future and looking forward to seeing it in Beta and subsequently Stable!