Brave Picks Up Vertical Tabs

Brave offers a safer and more private web browsing experience than any of its competitors, but it often lags behind in adding new features from other Chromium-based browsers. And so it with vertical tabs, the only major new feature in Brave 1.52, which is based on Chromium 114.

“Brave’s vertical tabs feature is now available for users to experience a new way to manage open tabs,” the announcement post notes. “With today’s 1.52 desktop release, the vertical tabs setting is available to Brave users on Windows, macOS, and Linux.”

As with other browsers, vertical tabs moves the browser’s open tabs from the top of the browser to the left side, providing more vertical space but a lot less horizontal space. And so one might argue that using vertical tabs actually makes more sense on wide 16:9 displays than it does on more modern 16:10 and 3:2 displays. But vertical tabs can help make the title of each tab more readable as each is given more space, which can be helpful for those who use many tabs. And there are options for vertical tabs that free up even more space. So it’s really just a matter of personal preference: some people just prefer to display browser tabs vertically, and some don’t.

To move the tabs in Brave to the left, right-click any open tab and choose “Use vertical tabs” from the pop-up menu that appears. You can also customize the vertical tabs experience in Brave settings by navigating to Appearance. Once you enable the feature, two new options—“Show title bar” and “Expand vertical tabs panel on mouseover when collapsed”—will appear. Each can provide even more space for browsing while in this mode. You collapse the vertical tabs panel by clicking the “Minimize tabs” button at the top of the vertical tabs panel.

You can download Brave 1.52 from the Brave website. If you’re already using Brave—as I do and recommend—then you can update via “About Brave” in settings.