Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).

Depends on what one values. I tried TST and Sidebery among other extensions for Firefox, but their "bolted on" feeling always bothered me. That can be somewhat fixed with userChrome mods, but those tend to be fragile and it's not unusual for them break with updates, and even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.

For my personal usage I find the deep nesting of TST to get in the way more than it helps and so the simpler model of Arc/Zen where nesting only happens intentionally is nice.

Indeed you need to write some firefox css to use either TST or Sidebery. But it's pretty rare for it to break. It actually broke a few days ago, I fixed it in a few minutes - ctrl+shift+alt+i opens the developer tools for the browser UI itself, then it's a matter of selecting the faulty element and writing the CSS to hide it or whatever. Or, ask a LLM to write the CCS for you. Or check out https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ since probably someone has posted a fix there

> even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.

Hmm what's Sidebery missing?

I was maintaining such a setup for a while and didn't have such luck. Sometimes it'd fully break and sometimes things would shift around due to other CSS changing, but whatever the case it's more than I had the patience to babysit.

> Hmm what's Sidebery missing?

The extensions themselves aren't lacking, but they suffer from being extensions and not part of the browser proper, which makes for occasional weird interactions and glitches and the "seams" between extension and host becoming tangible from time to time. Things just work better when the browser "knows" about the tabs being vertical and having deeper organization than is possible with horizontal tab bars, or is even designed around vertical tabs being the only option (like Arc/Zen).

Note that Firefox nowadays has vertical tabs. It's just less powerful than Sidebery (like, not sure if they nest)

I used and love TST (plus a huge number of extensions - TST is an extension that is extended with further extensions!) but it's complex and clunky.

Sidebery can do the 80% of TST that matters, with a better UI and UX and saner defaults. Also it has a feature to save and restore all tabs, with the whole tree structure preserved (even though I think it should be its own extension)

Only problem is that I suspect that Sidebery has severe memory leaks (not entirely sure it's the culprit though)

Not to the degree of polish that Zen has. Source: I ran into a single particularly annoying Zen bug and attempted this: both myself and an agent.

You can add all the features, but you can't make them work well together (or look nice in some cases - which does matter!)

Might be true, but that was not the point. The comparision was Firefox and Zen, not Firefox, Zen and whatever else is out there :>

> first

Firefox has those features now, that's all that matters. Not sure I wanna trust a solo dev on my daily browser, however competent they are.

No it doesn't, don't cherry pick what fits your narrative. Firefox has vertical tabs, that's it. It's great that Firefox finally has native support for vertical tabs, but its roughly 10% of what I like in Arc/Zen.

> vertical tabs, that's it

split panels, profile switcher, tab groups...

The 90% remaining are UI gimmicks that are irrelevant anyway (mods, custom cursor, free canvas?). Even when Arc was still alive they're useless which is why the browser died (it sucked at doing things that matter). Zen just picked up this lack of focus and make it worse with the solo maintainer situation.

Split tab view, convert to vertical/horizontal split, the easily swipable spaces... the list goes on

Yes, the new library has so many problems, one of which is forced adoption. Zen fork time??

Could you list a couple of things you find wierd? Wondering if its worth switching

Not OP, but I am not a fan of the newly introduced library. Exploring my history is bad in Firefox, and this is even worse. It doesn’t show full page titles, so it’s almost impossible to find the right page.

History feels like the only part of Firefox that is still stuck somewhere in the late noughties. They should just copy what Chrome and Safari have done and make it a webpage instead of a separate window.

Firefox's visible UI is made of webpages. They just decided to open this webpage in separate window without an option to do otherwise. Still can access it by visiting `chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml`.

Slight correction with Safari, it uses a native NSOutlineView rather than a webpage, but the point that history works better in the main browser window stands.

I go hunting for pages i read months ago and need to reference again pretty often. Browser history containing only the site and title isn't great for that but it's what i have

Agreed. It’s really annoying to be honest.

Honestly, pretty much this :')