Mozilla is quietly working on Vertical tabs for Firefox, asks for community feedback

Firefox has always been a great alternative in a world of Chromium browsers, and it seems that Mozilla is testing some new features.

According to our findings, Mozilla is working on vertical tabs in Firefox, so we might see them available someday.

Mozilla is currently working on vertical tabs for Firefox

Fans of Firefox have been asking for vertical tabs for years, and you can see the most requests for this feature on Mozilla Connect in 2022.

This is an early concept, and currently, this feature is available for download and testing only in Firefox Nightly, in a disposable branch called Larch.

The tabs are showing both horizontally and vertically, and there’s no way to turn off one mode or another entirely.

This feature also sparked a discussion on Reddit with Mozilla employees chiming in on this feature.

We built this very rough proof-of-concept to test an interaction model capable of solving needs that have become table stakes in modern browsers — without utterly overloading Firefox.

Some of the things we looked at include cross-referencing two sources of information handily (as in split view), multi-tasking and scanning lists quickly (as in vertical tabs), prioritizing and returning to your frequently used tools efficiently (as in pinning tabs to the sidebar).

Many (seemingly good, to put it charitably) ideas did not survive this prototype. The good news is that we are working on a subset of improvements to Firefox based on what we learned from this first rough draft.

We will start involving the community for feedback in the upcoming months, once we have laid the foundations for what we are building in Nightly. Please follow Mozilla Connect — we will announce updates there.

As you can see, this is just a rough concept for now, but moving forward Mozilla might focus more on it. If you’re interested in other upcoming features, you should know that Firefox 125 will drop support for HTTP downloads.