qbrt VS treestyletab

I assume they meant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XULRunner, which was Mozilla's spiritual predecessor to Electron.

Some abandoned modern alternatives included Positron[1][2] and qbrt[3][4].

While technically possible using Firefox's XULRunner functionality (`firefox --app app.ini` — mostly undocumented, potentially unsupported in the future), as far as I can tell, Mozilla has abandoned the Electron approach for XUL/Gecko bundling, which is a shame since Firefox itself is basically just an implementation on top of the Gecko XUL runtime.

> "[Firefox] is distributed as the combination of a Gecko XUL runtime — libxul, other shared libraries, and non-browser-specific resources like those in toolkit/ — plus a Firefox XUL application — mostly just the files in Contents/Resources/browser/, plus the 'firefox' stub executable that loads Gecko and points it at a XUL application" [5]

[1]: https://github.com/mozilla/positron

[2]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210227132731/https://mykzilla.o...

[3]: https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

[4]: http://web.archive.org/web/20210601133844/https://mykzilla.o...

[5]: https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/#comme...

The issue with this is that the more deeply customisable a fork would be the further it would stray from upstream (and by extension the more dev resources it would require to maintain).

> I keep hearing the Firefox codebase isn't very modular and makes it hard to pursue such a project, and I don't doubt it. But aren't there enough of "us" out there to make a concerted effort?

There's been plenty of people making such an effort, but yeah it does appear to be "hard". If you're interested in following previous work, some relevant links:

- Overview of Myk Melez's efforts in this space https://mykzilla.org/2017/03/08/positron-discontinued/

- https://mozilla.github.io/geckoview/ (official but Android-only)

- https://github.com/mozilla/qbrt

It may also be worthwhile reading about CEF which has become something of a defacto standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromium_Embedded_Framework

TreeStyleTabs author lists some more elaborate css [1].

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Addressing grandparent's comment regarding lack of tab grouping, I made a custom stylesheet for TST that somewhat tries to tackle this:

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/discussions/3369

I was really enjoying tree tabs and panels of the Arc browser [0] but decided to rollback to firefox so I could have something cross platform. Sidebery lets me do nested tab groups, tab panels, plus its got my bookmarks as a panel too. Performance so far is really good, with ~50 tabs anyway.

Only trouble is I had to go to relatively great lengths to hide my horizontal tabs: enable userChrome stylesheets, go to about:support to find my Profile folder, create a chrome folder, create a userChrome.css file and paste contents from [1], and restart. So now I have only the side bar of tree tabs, and a hot key to hide/show. Screencap attached [2]

[0] https://arc.net/

[1] https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

[2] https://coltenj.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Screenshot-20...

Out of the box Tree Style Tabs is not very good, due to decisions made by Firefox that are beyond its control.

Enabling the desires behavior likely requires quite a few steps beyond just installing the extension.

https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/wiki/Code-snippets-fo...

Originally, Firefox had a dropdown menu that allowed the user to choose whether tabs were on the top, bottom, left, or right.

This has been an annoying trend with Firefox for some time. They take the default, expected functionality, marginalize it while saying "Users who prefer the old way can enable it in a setting / extension" and then the setting gets deprecated or the extension gets broken by Firefox.

See also: "Classic Theme Restorer".

I don't really think anyone is copying anyone here. This is a popular feature for browsers that has been around for over a decade.

Orion[1] is another recent MacOS browser that released before Arc in 2021 and has vertical tabs. Edge had vertical tabs as an experiment back in 2020[2] and is full feature now. Vivaldi has had vertical tabs since 2015[3]. It might not count since it's not built in, but Firefox has had vertical tab extensions since 2007[4].

[1]https://browser.kagi.com/

[2] https://www.howtogeek.com/697986/how-to-enable-and-use-verti...

[3]https://www.maketecheasier.com/vertical-tabs-browsers/

[4]https://github.com/piroor/treestyletab/graphs/contributors

Use treestyletab

If you need further help with this, use the official Tree Style Tab forum or look for solutions on /r/FirefoxCSS.