It has been over 10 years since I started using chrome productivity extensions and vertically listed tabs. It all started when I worked as an Xfinity infrastructure engineer at Comcast, managing multiple projects simultaneously. Every day, I would have 5 or more tabs opened specifically for each project. The more I did, the slower I seemed to get.
The slowdown wasn’t even entirely a problem of too many tabs, but instead an inability to quickly switch between one project’s tab and another project’s tab because I visually couldn’t identify them quickly enough. Worse, too many tabs and I couldn’t even see titles due to their width growing too small. My brain was running at 100 miles per hour and my eyes couldn’t find what I needed to keep up. What was maybe a second or two to click through various tabs to find the right one, feels like an eternity when you are under pressure. There were many other reasons too: similar favicons, similar page titles, no page titles, etc etc. All of these I needed a solution for, and quick.
So I started down the rabbit hole looking for a solution. Within an hour my search ended when I found tree-style tabs (a plugin for Firefox). This served me for many years until I decided to migrate to Chrome, as at the time Chrome had a better experience for users of Google’s products like Gmail, etc. Switching wasn’t going to be easy, but I sat down for an hour one weekend, popped a can of sparkling water, and got to work switching everything over.
Close to the end of the process, I finally had to migrate the extensions I used. This is when I realized that the Chrome tree-style tab extensions were… just not the same. I ended up using a limited version of one for many years, even after it became unmaintained and I had to install it manually — yuck! Seeing as I never stopped multitasking throughout my career, I just had to find a permanent solution.
Vertically Listed Tabs
I decided that enough was enough and I could use my programming experience to design and develop my own extension, one that I could have full control over and maintain for fun on the side of my full-time job. ONLYHUMN sprang forth when I realized that the software I wanted to write had to be centered around returning TIME back to people. Time is the only unrenewable resource we have, and I feel passionate about building software that people not only need for productivity but also saves them precious time.
Enter VLT: The Vertically Listed Tabs Chrome Extension!
The Vertically Listed Tabs Chrome Extension allows users to solve the “too many horizontal tabs problem” by listing them vertically in a fixed panel on the side of their browser windows. The VLT panel displays tabs in a way that exposes much more of the tab titles and also supports tab groups, so you can keep the various project tabs you manage organized.
Features
You can see a full list of features at the official Chrome Web Store Page
You can view the public project tracker with a list of all planned and in-progress dev tasks on the public GitHub.
Public issues can be discussed under https://github.com/NorseGaud/vertically-listed-tabs-chromium, but there is also a support feature under the Google Chrome Webstore listing. Otherwise, email [email protected] with questions.
I hope you enjoy the tool!
Explore more ONLYHUMN tools on the homepage or browse our Chrome extensions.
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