I tried Opera’s new vertical tabs – and it might be the best implementation yet

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ZDNET’s key takeaways

• After years of requests, Opera finally adds vertical tabs.
• Opera’s vertical tabs are easier to use than most.
• You can easily switch between vertical and horizontal tabs.

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.

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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.

It’s simple, it’s efficient… it’s vertical tabs.

Opera finally catches up

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.

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Of course, Opera being Opera, it decided to take the efficiency of vertical tabs and make it slightly easier than other browsers. It pulled off this feat through how you switch between vertical and horizontal tabs.

How vertical tabs work in Opera

If you’ve just started using Opera — or have been using it in the default configuration — you’ll be using horizontal tabs (which run horizontally across the top of the browser).

Right-click (or two-finger tap) any one of those open tabs, and at the bottom of the resulting menu, you’ll see an entry labeled “Use vertical tab strip.” Click that entry, and all of your open tabs will migrate to the left as a sidebar.

By switching to vertical tabs, Opera retains all of your pinned tabs and your Workspaces organization, so you don’t have to worry that switching will require you to go through all of those open tabs and clean them up.

To move back to horizontal tabs, all you have to do is right-click (or two-finger tap) a tab (or empty space in the tab strip) and click “Use horizontal tab strip.”

Resizing your tab strip

When using vertical tabs, you have the option of resizing your tab strip. Say, for example, you need more horizontal real estate for a particular web page. You can click and hold the vertical separator between the tab strip and the web page and drag it to the left to shrink the tab strip or to the right to enlarge it.

Of course, if you shrink it down too much, you’ll wind up with the same issue you had with horizontal tabs and won’t be able to discern which tab is which. I keep the tab strip wide enough that I can read at least a portion of each page’s title. When I need more screen for a web page, I’ll shrink the tab strip and then enlarge it when I’m done.

To Opera, I say, “Thank you for always listening.” I’ve watched this browser constantly evolve to meet the needs and requests of its users better than any browser on the market, and vertical tabs show the company’s commitment to satisfied users.

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If you’re already an Opera user, you can go to the Update & Recovery page and either check for an update or click Relaunch Now if the update has already been downloaded. If you’ve not yet tried Opera, go to the official site and download the installer for your OS.