Sometimes, having vertical tab sidebars is easier for viewing purposes than horizontal ones. Firefox gives you a couple of options in this respect.
In 2021, Microsoft added a vertical tabs feature to Edge. Turning on Edge’s vertical tab option activates a sidebar that includes open page tabs. Users can then switch between pages by clicking their tabs in that sidebar.
Alas, Firefox doesn’t have such a built-in vertical tab feature. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t have a tabbed sidebar in Mozilla’s flagship browser. You can add vertical tabs to Mozilla Firefox with the Tab Center Reborn and Sidebery add-ons.
Tab Center Reborn is a freely-available tab sidebar add-on for Firefox rated 4.8 (out of five) by users. Its vertical sidebar integrates all the standard page options from Firefox’s standard horizontal tab bar. That extension’s sidebar can also adapt to your browser’s theme when selected to do so.
To get Tab Center Reborn for Firefox:
You’ll immediately notice that the sidebar has thumbnail previews for open page tabs. Those thumbnail previews are admittedly a bit small and not entirely clear. Nevertheless, that’s still a visual feature Firefox’s horizontal tab bar doesn’t have.
The other thing you’ll probably notice is the search box at the top of the vertical sidebar. You can search for open page tabs by entering keywords for them in the Filter tabs box. Firefox’s horizontal tab bar also has a tab search feature, but that only becomes available when you’ve opened lots of pages.
Tab Center Reborn has some keyboard shortcuts. Press the Shift + F1 hotkey to open and close the vertical sidebar. Pressing the Shift + F2 hotkey will open your last active page tab.
To check out Tab Center Reborn’s options, click the Open settings button at the top right of the vertical sidebar. There aren’t that many customization options available, but you can make some changes to the sidebar’s appearance and behavior. For example, you can select the Enabled for the Compact mode setting to remove the thumbnail previews.
You customize the vertical sidebar more by entering CSS scripts in the CSS text box. Select the Custom Stylesheet checkbox to input a script there. Pressing the Save CSS button will apply the entered script’s tweak to the sidebar.
If you’re not especially CSS-savvy, check out the Tab Center Reborn tweaks page. That webpage includes a series of CSS scripts you can copy and paste into the CSS box to apply them. Select the code for a script there, press the Ctrl + C hotkey, and paste it into the CSS box with the Ctrl + V keyboard shortcut.
Download: Tab Center Reborn for Firefox (Free)
Sidebery is a vertical tab sidebar add-on that displays page tabs with a tree structure. That means subpages from the same websites branch out from their homepages within that sidebar. This extension also incorporates a bookmark sidebar panel.
You can add Sidebery to Firefox by clicking the Add to Firefox option. Then, you’ll see a Toggle Sidebery sidebar button on Firefox’s URL toolbar. Click that button to view the vertical tab sidebar.
Sidebery displays your open page tabs within the default panel. When you open linked pages from the same website in new tabs, you’ll notice how they branch out from their root pages in the sidebar. You can click a small arrow on the left side of the primary root tab to fold or expand its webpage sub-trees.
Firefox’s native horizontal tab sidebar doesn’t support tab grouping at the time of writing. However, you can group page tabs in Sidebery’s sidebar. To do so, right-click a page in the sidebar and select the Group option. Then drag-and-drop other pages in the sidebar into the same group. Click the grouped tab to select and open pages from it.
To access your favorite websites, click the Bookmarks panel button at the top of the sidebar. There you can click your bookmark folders to view and open the saved pages from them. You can also manage your bookmarks from there by right-clicking saved pages to select Delete, Edit, and Create folder options.
Sidebery includes a wide variety of customization options for you to tweak. Press the Open settings button at the top right of the vertical tab bar to view the Sidebery / Settings tab. There, you can configure the appearance, general, mouse, keybinding, panel, bookmarks, container, and tab tree settings—plus more besides.
Click Appearance on the left of the Settings tab to check out the sidebar’s visual options. There, you can expand or shrink the sidebar’s text size by changing the Font size option. Select dark for the Color scheme option to turn the sidebar black.
To fully configure the sidebar’s color scheme, press the Edit styles button just below those appearance options. Then you can customize the colors by turning on the common color settings. Click the round palette buttons to choose different colors from there. You can restore all the default settings by clicking Reset at the bottom of Styles Editor.
Styles Editor also enables you to customize Sidebery’s tabs. Scroll down to the Tabs section shown directly below. There you can turn on tab height, indent, font, border, shadow, and color options to customize Sidebery further.
Sidebery has numerous hotkeys you can customize. Click Keybindings on the left of Settings to view the extension’s keyboard shortcuts. You can configure existing hotkeys or add new ones by clicking the keybinding options there. Then press custom key combinations for them.
If that’s not enough, you can also customize Sidebery’s context menus with its menu editor. Click Menu editor on the Sidebery tab’s left navigation bar. From there, you can reorder or disable options on the extension’s tab, panel, and bookmarks context menus by clicking the arrow and X buttons.
Download: Sidebery for Firefox (Free)
The advantages of adding vertical tabs to Firefox are plentiful. A vertical sidebar provides more tab space and can fully fit in most page labels when widened. Sidebery and Tab Center Reborn also provide new tab management features on top. So, you can transform your browsing in Firefox with either of those add-ons.
Jack has been a freelance tech journalist for more than a decade. He has covered Windows Vista, 7, 10, and 11 topics within a multitude of guides for Make Use Of and numerous other websites.
Join our newsletter for tech tips, reviews, free ebooks, and exclusive deals!