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.

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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.

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.

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.

If you're using horizontal tabs, you can easily switch to vertical tabs.