When you have a lot of browser tabs open it can be very hard to tell them apart, especially if they're from the same site:

Since monitors are wide and websites are tall, we should very clearly put tabs on the side in a vertical stack. I was a heavy user of these in Firefox, and when I switched to Chrome I used their experimental --enable-vertical-tabs flag. When they removed it I wrote a post about how I love side tabs and switched back to Firefox:

I did end up switching back to Chrome as my primary browser (no post, sorry!), valuing speed and stability (relative to the Firefox of the time) more than side tabs.

When I started at Google in 2012 I asked the Chrome team if they could restore support for it, or at least make it be the kind of thing extensions could do. They told me that while they got this request a lot from Googlers, real users generally find it too confusing. And they were trying to build a "great defaults, no options" culture, to keep Chrome simple.

They've finally come around, however, and have [...]

---

First published:
August 5th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/F2oDrXPbLSxSXBmut/vertical-tabs-in-chrome

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Blog homepage showing articles by jefftk.com.

Chromium bug tracker page showing issue about vertical tabs.

Browser dropdown menu open over a blog page.

Blog homepage with article list and reading pane.

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

“Vertical Tabs in Chrome” by jefftk

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Vertical Tabs in Chrome” by jefftk