Why I Stopped Using Vertical Tabs After Two Years | GoPeek

Tab Management<br>Opinion<br>Experience

Why I Stopped Using Vertical Tabs After Two Years

June 22, 2026<br>6 min read<br>By GoPeek Team

Vertical tabs fit more titles. They also fit more excuses to keep tabs open.

I switched to vertical tabs in 2024. Vivaldi first, then Edge, then Arc. I told everyone they were the future. The horizontal tab bar was a relic, while vertical was clean, scalable, and modern. But I was wrong.

Two years later fast forward, I had to switch back. Not because horizontal tabs are any better. Because vertical tabs solved one problem and created three new ones. The cost was higher than the benefit.

What Vertical Tabs Promise

Look, the horizontal tab bar was designed for 5 to 8 tabs. Modern users run 20 to 40. The horizontal bar shrinks titles to favicons, then to nothing. You cannot tell what anything is. You click randomly, until half your time just goes into finding the right tab.

Vertical tabs move the list to the left sidebar. Each tab gets a full title and clear favicon. You can fit 30, 40, 50 tabs with readable labels. In vertical tabs, scrolling replaces squishing. On the surface, it seems like the browser finally caught up to how people actually work.

I had bought in completely. I told my team to switch, I literally mocked a few fellows in the cafe who were still using horizontal tabs. But then my eyes fell on the data.

Problem 1: They Encourage More Tabs

The horizontal tab bar has a hard limit. At 15 tabs, titles disappear. At 20, the bar is unusable. This is a feature, which forces a decision, close something or suffer. Most people close something. The discomfort is the guardrail.

Vertical tabs remove the guardrail. You can fit 50 tabs with full titles. You can fit 80 if you scroll. The sidebar never tells you to stop. It never looks crowded. It just gets longer. And longer. And longer.

22<br>Average tabs with horizontal bar

51<br>Average tabs with vertical sidebar

132%<br>Increase in tab count

Naturally, my tab count went from 22 to 51. Note it's not because I may have actually needed more tabs, but because vertical tabs made 51 look manageable. The sidebar scrolled, and the titles were readable. I did not feel like I had a problem. I had 51 processes running and felt fine about it. RAM was killed.

Problem 2: They Steal Screen Space

A vertical sidebar is 240 to 300 pixels wide. On a 1920px monitor, that is 13 to 16% of your width. On a laptop, it is worse. You are paying 15% of your screen for a list of tabs you do not need open.

You can collapse the sidebar. But then you lose the titles. You are back to favicons, except now they are stacked vertically and are harder to scan. You can auto-hide it. But then every tab switch requires a hover, a wait, a click. The sidebar becomes a chore, which has a psychological effect of changing tabs as less as you can, and even this tension in between causes effort driven by indecision.

I tried every configuration. Wide sidebar: too much space lost. Narrow sidebar: titles truncated, might as well use horizontal. Collapsed is useless. Auto-hide is irritating. There is no winning setup if you ponder a bit.<br>Overall, the vertical tab is a spatial tax you pay permanently for a problem you should solve behaviourally.

Problem 3: They Lock You In

Vertical tabs are not a standard. Chrome does not have them natively. Safari does not have them at all. Firefox has them hidden behind flags, while Edge has them built-in but they are buggy. Arc has them by default but Arc is Mac-only and a full browser migration. In recent days, you can see some forked browsers that do support vertical tabs, like Zen forked out of Firefox, and Helium which is based on Chromium, but what to talk of them.

Once you adapt to vertical tabs, switching browsers is painful. You are trapped in the one browser that supports your tab layout. That browser might be slow, or missing extensions, or breaking updates. But you stay because leaving means relearning how to browse.

I was locked into Edge for 8 months because of vertical tabs. Edge is fine. But it is not Chrome for extensions. It is not Firefox for privacy. So I stayed not because Edge was best, but only because my tab layout was just not portable. That is a bad reason to use a browser.

What I Tried to Fix It

I did not give up easily. I tried every workaround.

Collapsible sidebar: Kept it collapsed most of the day. Opened it to switch tabs. Closed it to work. I was toggling every 3 minutes. The sidebar became a UI I managed, not a tool I used.

Tab groups within vertical tabs: Nested organization inside nested organization. I had groups inside a sidebar inside a browser. It was a filing cabinet for a problem I should have solved by throwing things away.

Session managers: Saved vertical tab sessions, restored them later. My saved sessions became a second browser. I had 12 "workspaces" with 30 tabs each. I was not reducing tabs. I was archiving them in...