Browser vertical tabs are great (and they’re older than you think!)

On a forum recently the conversation drifted into talking about the innovations different Web browsers had introduced, over the years. Another participant called out Vivaldi for bringing us vertical tabs upon its release in 2015. Vivaldi certainly does a good job with its vertical tabs. But it wasn’t first. Vivaldi’s a fine browser, but it wasn’t first to add the option of vertical tabs. I’m pretty confident that was Opera 4.0, a decade and a half earlier in 2000. To check my memory, I spun up a Windows XP virtual machine and installed a copy. It struggles with today’s CSS and image formats and needed some help around the modern cryptography, but I was pleased to see that the fundamental content of my website is still basically readable in this 26-year-old browser. Anyway: it’s the tabs on the left hand side you should be looking at. I used vertical tabs on-and-off in Opera, back in the day. For me, the benefits of vertical tabs came later on, as I’ll explain! For a long while I…