Overwhelmed by Your Browser Tabs? Firefox’s New Vertical Tabs Can Help.

I still remember the day Google Chrome unleashed itself upon the world. It was 2008, and it seemed like within a month it’d taken an enormous bite out of the market. Everyone was asking, “Have you switched to Chrome?”

Yes, society was apparently that boring back then. These were regular folks, not tech people asking. For the four years prior, though, Mozilla Firefox had been the king. Maybe not in numbers, thanks to Safari and Internet Explorer that shipped as default browsers in Mac OS X and Windows products, respectively.

But Firefox had the sheen of being on the cutting edge. Since Chrome took its crown, browsers may behave differently, but they’ve largely looked the same. Firefox Version 136.0 (I told you it was old) was released on March 4, and it shakes up the archetypical browser layout by introducing something fresh and new: optional vertical tabs.

Why Firefox is still Chrome’s arch enemy

From its introduction to the public in 2004, Mozilla’s Firefox was the darling of a nascent revolution in internet browsers. Mac users tended to just use Apple’s own Safari, which debuted in 2003. Netscape was a wilted flower during that period, having lost its crown as king of browsers ages ago.

Internet Explorer, for the Windows-afflicted of us, was the sort of default browser nobody was ever happy to use. The early-to-mid 2000s were wide open for disruption. And then Chrome, with the massive weight of Google behind it, stole the crown ever since.

Firefox soldiered on as a very competent alternative, but its layout—like all major browsers since—coalesced around the familiar “horizontal tabs at the top of the window” that feels so old now that it’s hard to remember that Internet Explorer didn’t get tabs until 2006.

As far as speed, Firefox and Chrome have been trading the lead back and forth for many years. Comparable, is how I’d generally put it. And in terms of hogging computer resources, Firefox is considered a lighter-weight browser than Chrome.

But through now, the primary difference was in their ethos and their ethics. Mozilla and Google couldn’t be more different. One is a non-profit that prioritizes privacy and digital rights, and the other is a megalomaniac corporation that seeks to dominate and smother, expanding through the approach that the consumer’s online behavior is a product to mine and sell.

Firefox is available to download for free for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS, if you want to give it a whirl and see if it can rescue you from the tangled yarn ball of open tabs that I know you keep perpetually on your devices. No, I can’t see them, but I know they’re there because I have the same flaw.