vTabs brings vertical tabs to Google Chrome (with one caveat)

When you compare Google Chrome to Mozilla Firefox, you will notice sooner or later that Firefox supports displaying contents in a sidebar while Chrome does not.

The Firefox browser ships with options to display the History or Bookmarks in a sidebar natively and add-ons extend that functionality further.

TreeStyleTab moves tabs from being displayed horizontally in the browser to the sidebar which is excellent not only because more tabs can be displayed at the same time on the screen with more information but also because the removal of the horizontal tab bar makes room for website contents.

Chrome does not support sidebars but that does not mean that open tabs cannot be displayed vertically in the browser.

The free extension vTabs adds that functionality to the Chrome browser. Once installed it will display open tabs in an overlay on the left side of the browser window.

Doing so means that contents of the active site may be hidden underneath it and while that's not a problem on many sites on large enough screens, it causes issues on sites that are aligned to the left and not centered.

This is mitigated by the fact that you can hide and display the sidebar at any time.

Another issue related to that is that it takes some time before the sidebar is displayed when you open a new tab or load a new website.

The third and final issue is that the extension does not hide the horizontal tab bar in Chrome so that it is displayed even if tabs are displayed on the side as well.

The extension offers quite a few options and themes that users will find interesting. You can display the sidebar at all times for instance, or enable hotkey support to display and hide it on the screen.

Other options include double-clicking on the panel to open a nen tab or middle-clicking on open tabs in the sidebar to close them in the browser window.

The extension ships with five themes that you can activate. There is a dark theme for instance which may fit well on systems that use a dark Chrome theme.

A small menu at the top enables you to switch to a list of tabs that were recently open in the browser and tabs that you can move to a save area so that they don't appear in the main tab bar of the browser or the sidebar but are not lost completely as you can open them from there any time.

Closing Words

The vTabs extension adds a vertical tabs option to the Chrome browser. The implementation is quite good even though it is limited in many regards due to extension limitations.

While inferior to Firefox's implementation, it is an excellent option for Chrome users who like an option to display tabs vertically in the browser.