Do you want to give vertical tabs a test-drive in the new Chromium Microsoft Edge? If you do, you’ll be pleased to know the software giant has recently updated the Dev build to contain this handy feature for tab-aholics.
What Are Vertical Tabs?
If you’re left scratching your head over what a vertical tab is, it’s a handy tool that helps with tab management once you start accumulating a large number of them.
When you only have a few tabs open in your browser, they tend to work just fine. Tabs present the favicon (the little icon to the left of each tab) and the page title in a horizontal manner, and tabs are arranged horizontally across the top of your browser. As such, you can do a quick left-right scan across the top to find the tab you’re looking for.
Things get a little messy when you begin opening a lot of tabs. When this happens, the browser tries a few tricks to pack all of the tabs along the top. It can let you scroll left and right through the tabs, squeeze each tab down to just the favicon, or—if you’re really deep in the tabs—both at once.
Whichever method the browser uses, you’ll encounter issues with trying to scan through the tabs to find the one you want. If you need to scroll through the tabs, the one you’re looking for may be out of sight and require you to scroll around until you find it.
If it’s reduced to a favicon, you can see what website the page is from, but not what the webpage is about. And if both have kicked in at the same time, you’re in for a world of hurt.
Vertical tabs solve this problem by offering a button that moves the tabs from the top of the browser to the left. The feature can then list the tabs in a vertical arrangement, giving you enough room to see every tab’s title and showing more of them at once before you need to scroll.
If the sidebar is taking up too much room, you can click an arrow at the top to reduce each tab to a favicon. This means you can swap between extra webpage space and tab details to better sort through your tab hell.
How to Try the Vertical Tabs Feature for Chromium Edge
If you want to give this feature a try, hop over to the Microsoft Edge Insider Channels page and grab the one called “Dev.” While you’re waiting, be sure to check out the full patch notes over on the Microsoft Tech Community, which contains auto-filling birthdays and some Web Capture stability fixes.
The Microsoft Dev and Canary branches are also currently testing native M1-based Mac support, so be sure to give that a try if you own one.
Taking Tabs on Microsoft Edge’s Vertical Tabs
If you love having lots of tabs open but hate managing them all, vertical tabs may be the answer to your browser nightmare. Be sure to give it a spin on the Dev channel and keep your eyes peeled when it lands on the main Edge channel.
If you want to slay your tab hydra, but you can’t afford to let go of Google Chrome, there are plenty of extensions you can download that can do the job for you.
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