[JKT]

Contrived? Absolutely not. Every single point I made is something I need from my tabs. Look, I am constantly moving between a lot of tabs (and I mean tens to hundreds spread over many Workspaces) so I do need to be able to see what is in each of them, I do need to be able to access each of them as quickly as I can. So I do care about each and every one of those points I made and the fact that the vertical thumbnail tabs solves each and every one of them for me is great. At work I have to use a PC and I am using Firefox (thankfully I don't have to use IE6 which doesn't even have tabs!). Now that I am using 2.x, the one extension that I found that mimicked the vertical tabs doesn't work and I am SOL, suffering from a completely inferior implementation for my needs, that slows me down greatly when I need to switch between tabs.

Hands up to expressing some assumptions in last two points (and elsewhere) though, but it is comments like this that really get my goat:

The thing is the Horizontal top of browser Tabs is a time proven method, it doesn't require a different method just to be different much like the start button in windows so why bother implementing and wasting so many resources designing an inferior poorly thought out concept with other things just work better.

...and it isn't just here that I have read similar kneejerk "yah booh, vertical tabs suck" reactions.

FWIW, for my points 5 and 6 - it can be implemented with a horizontal tab bar, but look at the screenshots... it hasn't been in Safari or Firefox (1.5 at the time)! If you exceeded a certain number in FF 1.x you can't even see a title on the tab, nevermind see what is unique or different about each - how on earth can you pick the one you need to close or view without clicking through the whole lot? (This is now semi-solved in FF2.0 where the tabs don't go below a certain size so you can at least see some of the title, and the Tab Mix Plus extension lets you colour code the titles to show their status, but AFAIK, Firefox still doesn't do this by default).

Anyway, as people seem to continue to misunderstand the tone of my posts. I apologise in advance for those that take offence. OmniGroup please implement horizontal tabs for those that want them so that I no longer end up expressing myself like an arrogant twat on the subject.