// ZDNET — MOBILE & WEB
I tried Opera's new vertical tabs - and it might be the best implementation yet
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I've been using Opera, on and off, for over a decade. The browser has several features that have become absolute musts for me, such as Workspaces, split screen, and a brilliant theming engine.
But the one feature that has been missing all this time is vertical tabs.
For those of you who've never given vertical tabs a try, you don't know what you're missing. Let me try to explain.
Let's say you're like me and typically have a lot of tabs open in your browser. I currently have 36 tabs open in my browser -- and that's low for me. If I were using horizontal tabs, those tabs would be so small that I'd have trouble finding the one I needed to work with. It would be a hunt-and-peck affair, or I'd have to use a keyboard shortcut to cycle through the tabs until I landed on the one I wanted.
Also: Opera just gave me 5 compelling reasons to ditch Chrome and Safari for good
With vertical tabs, on the other hand, I can easily see every tab label, so there's no guesswork involved in finding the right one. I look for the name, click on it, and I'm there.
Several of the browsers I use (such as Vivaldi) have included a vertical tabs feature. Even Firefox (a browser I thought would never add vertical tabs) gave us the feature. I've reached a point where I won't use a browser if it doesn't have native vertical tabs. I don't care how pretty, efficient, or easy your browser is to use; if it only offers those primitive horizontal tabs, I'm not using it.
Thankfully, Opera finally heard our cries and added vertical tabs.
Also: I found 6 free browsers that make old computers feel surprisingly fast