There are two types of people in the online world; those who have just a few tabs open in their Web browsers and the rest of us. But your tabs don’t have to march along the top of your browser window! Here’s how to use vertical tabs to re-imagine your browsing experience.
Most computer screens are horizontally oriented, wider than they are tall. Big monitors for designers, tablets, laptops, just about every system display we interact with are in landscape mode. The one exception? Smartphones, that are designed to be in portrait mode (maybe because of all those selfies we take?). It’s no surprise that once the idea of a Web browser that could have more than one page loaded simultaneously came about, the designers immediately thought of tabs along the top of the screen.
As a result, we’ve all become quite familiar with the very top of our Web browsers – and now other app windows – having tabs. If you have a lot, however, each gets just a bit more squished so it ends up where you can barely differentiate which is which. You might be a multi-tasking maven, but this slows you down when you’re switching and moving around from tab to tab. But our screens are bigger nowadays too, so why are we stuck with this design?
Turns out that we’re not. Many Web browsers now include a feature called vertical tabs which is a game changer, particularly if you like to have a lot of tabs open and even more so if you have a really big screen. 25″ 4K display at work? You’re going to absolutely love this feature!
I’m going to demonstrate this feature in Microsoft Edge on Windows 11 but it should be available across browsers and operating systems; check your own settings for this layout option. Ready? Let’s goooooo….
EDGE WITH HORIZONTAL TABS: BORING
Here’s how your browser probably looks when you have the default set up and a bunch of Web pages open for reference:
Lots of tabs along the very top, but what do “Techn” and “7-Day” and “Micro” mean in terms of being able to quickly move to the correct tab? And what if you have 2x, 3x, even 10x as many tabs open, as many people do nowadays?
To try out vertical tabs, right-click on any of the tabs in your Edge browser. A context menu appears:
As you can see, near the bottom is “Turn on vertical tabs”, along with its keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+,. Enter the keyboard shortcut or choose this menu option and be prepared, because your display is going to change quite a bit:
There’s really a lot to like with this change, including both the increased legibility of every tab now on the left side and the fact that much more of the Web page title is displayed. The downside is that you’ve lost some actual window space for the page you’re viewing. That’s why I said this is best for bigger screens: Just widen your browser window to compensate.
COOL VERTICAL TAB TRICKS
Once you’ve switched it’s worth learning a few basic tricks with vertical tabs. The first is that you can click and drag to reorder things as you desire:
In this instance I’m moving ESPN nearer the top to help me find it quickly when I want to peek and get the latest news update in the sports world. Want to close a tab? Click the associated “x”.
Realize you didn’t want to close a tab? The tiny square icon on the top left of the vertical tabs area has a menu of its own that includes “Recently closed tabs”:
You can also use this menu to turn off vertical tabs if you want to go back to the O.G. horizontal tabs setup. 🙂
If you’re trying this out as you read, you’ve also noticed that hovering the cursor over a tab offers up a thumbnail view, something quite helpful to identify a desired Web page:
All quite helpful, really, and I promise, if you try vertical tabs for a few hours, you’ll be hooked. It really is a better way to manage a lot of tabs.
SEND TAB TO DEVICES
While we’re in Edge and looking at this feature, let’s add one more super helpful feature to the tutorial: Send Tab to Your Devices. Right-click on a tab and a menu pops up:
I am often using Mac and Windows computers simultaneously. Sometimes I get to a Web page on one computer that I’d like to explore on the other. That’s exactly what this feature allows! A click on Send tab to your devices on the ESPN page, for example, and it prompts:
In this case my Mac Edge browser shows up, but you can see that it’s easy to add a smartphone or tablet, as desired. I’ll choose “M1-MacBook-Pro” and almost immediately my Mac system pops up this little window:
It shows what’s shared and from what device so there are no surprises! Want to open it? Click on “Open in New Tab” and it’s added to the current browser, even on my MacBook:
This is quite handy in a lot of situations. For example, if you work at home and in an office, you could “send” tabs to your other device and open them when you arrive, allowing you to keep a shared context!
BONUS: EDGE TAB SETTINGS FOR PERFORMANCE
Features like vertical tabs can encourage you to have more Web pages open, which is great, but there is a potential performance cost, particularly with pages that have active components or might refresh every so often (like the ESPN home page). To mitigate that, go into Edge > Settings > System and performance and scroll down to find these options:
Carefully set these so that the tabs you ignore for many hours are sleeping rather than adversely impacting the performance of your PC computer.
Now, go try vertical tabs and let me know in the comments if you stick with ’em for future browsing!
Pro tip: I’ve been writing about Microsoft Windows and its many tools and utilities for many years. Please check out my extensive Windows help area for more useful tutorials while you’re here!