I've said it before — and I'll say it again, 'cause this is a good redundancy — VERTICAL TABS ROCK HARDCORE!!!

What rocks even more is Johnathon Weare — yeah, the Widefox guy! — came over to my blog to leave a comment and tip me off that Widefox's now fully compatible with Firefox 2.0. I had some earlier probs stuttering as I middle-clicked links to open in new tabs and another issue with "odd gradient sectioning", but both of those and more look to be cured now. Gosh, have a look at this beauty:

Widefox Rocks

You'll want to clickthrough and view the full-size version to see "the big picture". Is that 23 tabs I've got open? Heck yeah! Now, some explanations:

  • That's a typical # of tabs for me to have open. It's not show-offy "multitasking". I love to be able to focus on one thing at a time, and that means being able to alternate in the slice of an eye. If I didn't have all these tabs open at once, I'd have to open their pages up via bookmarks — even if cached, it's a slower process. This way, I have them preloaded, ready to go to, one after another.
  • What's more, I don't even have to click on a tab to activate it: many of the boons you see are made possible by Tab Mix Plus, a super add-on which enables a tab to gain focus just by hovering over it! I have that set for 100 msec in the Mouse > Mouse Gestures section of the Tab Mix Plus Options.
  • Johnny clued me into something else on his Widefox page: "More logical scroll wheel tab selection". Hey, I never thought of this before: wouldn't it be kickass to use the scroll wheel to roll between tabs in Second Life? It's certainly what I do in Firefox. Unlike the generic horizontal tabs, when you scroll up, you actually go up.
  • Again, I'll emphasize there's none of that multi-row confusion involved with horizontal tabs. I can't stand the scroll-laden nonsense that comes with having many horizontal tabs. In Second Life, it's especially annoying 'cuz if you want to show as many IM tabs as you possibly can, you have to widen the IM window to extremely wide proportions — which, of course, can make for uncomfortable reading.
  • My active tab's suitably hot pink, with loading progress bars in neon green. Also an option in Tab Mix Plus.
  • The tabs' different shades of gray are thanx to Aging Tabs, which I've championed before, and lets them do just that. Stale tabs keep getting darker unless you make them active again. Useful for cueing if you've been neglecting a particular document!
  • I can drag-'n'-drop tabs and reorder them as I wish.
  • Caveat: I do have a fairly large screen resolution: what you see here is 1242×1200, enough to fill one of my 1600×1200 monitors vertically, and leaving some space for my Windows Taskbar and Google Desktop on the left. My tabs are 189 pixels wide. Thinner tabs will also work nicely — you just won't be able to see titles as long as this, so you may find yourself looking at favicons. Not of much use if many of your open tabs are on the same site, as I also show.
  • Suggestion for Johnny: the provided userChrome.css @ Widefox has "min-width: 40ex;". That was way too broad for me, so I lowered it. Keep in mind Tab Mix Plus' tab width will take precedence over this, so if even if you set the "min-width" very low, like "min-width: 1px" (pixel), you can still get wiiiide tabs.

In case I can't made it clear enough: I LOVE VERTICAL TABS and I'D LIKE TO THANK JOHNNY WEARE GRACIOUSLY for coming all the way to let me know what he polished up. Don't take my word for it; check Widefox out for yourself, Johnny's provided great core instructions to get you setup. It's not a one-step process but I had it accomplished in a few minutes. He also has some supplementary suggestions to add more value and convenience to your Internet surfing experience.

How mint… which happens to be the flavor of Nanaimo bar I'm eating right now! :D