On 9 April 2026, 404 Media published an article about how the FBI was able to extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even though the Signal app had been deleted. That was possible because copies of the messages were saved in the iPhone’s notification database. Signal is specifically designed for private communication and offers disappearing messages, making iOS’s retention of notification content particularly problematic.

Apple doesn’t acknowledge the connection, but it seems likely that it triggered the releases of iOS 26.4.2 and iPadOS 26.4.2 and iOS 18.7.8 and iPadOS 18.7.8, which fix a Notification Services vulnerability. According to Apple, “notifications marked for deletion could be unexpectedly retained on the device” due to a logging issue that failed to redact data properly. It’s unclear exactly when a notification would be marked for deletion—is merely dismissing the notification enough?—though deleting the parent app should be sufficient.

This vulnerability primarily raises privacy concerns for anyone who worries about a government entity seizing their iPhone and using specialized forensic software on it. Although the updates also promise unspecified bug fixes, it doesn’t seem there’s any urgency for most users to install them.

As with the 18.7.7 releases, Apple continues to make iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 available to all iPhone and iPad models that can run them, even if they could also update to iOS 26 or iPadOS 26 (see “Apple Offers iOS 18.7.7 Security Update as Alternative to iOS 26.4 Upgrade,” 1 April 2026).

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To make a long story short, the FBI was able to retrieve deleted Signal messages from a confiscated iPhone. The owner of the phone was in a group accused of vandalizing an ICE detention facility, who had deleted the Signal app from his iPhone prior to being apprehended and getting her iPhone confiscated.

Deleting Signal should have deleted all the app’s messages, including those included in notifications.

But FBI found and was able to recover her Signal messages because the iPhone kept a cache of recent Notifications which included the Signal messages. Deleting didn’t clear those logged notifications. Signal has a somewhat obscure setting that disables message content in notifications, but the owner hadn’t turned that setting on.

The content of the Signal messages that the FBI found was used as evidence in her trial, in which she ended up pleading guilty to providing material support to terrorists.

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https://www.volvocars.com/au/news/articles/we-have-rolled-out-our-new-volvo-car-ux-to-millions-of-customers/

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I have restarted the computer (MBA M3 running macOS Sequoia 15.7.5) at least three times, including once from a full shutdown.

I have two more SSDs and one more spinning disk but have not connected them.

Help, please.

Edited to add that the SSD does not need to be mounted, but merely connected. If I click the eject arrow next to the device, quit Disk Utility, and restart Disk Utility, I get the message.

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John Ternus will be Apple’s new CEO, with Tim Cook ascending to the role of executive chairman. In a press release that’s worth reading in full for its accounting of what both executives have accomplished, Apple writes:

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

I know neither Tim Cook nor John Ternus personally, but based on their records, I think Apple is making a smart move here. Ternus has spent the last 25 years in Apple’s Hardware Engineering group, leading it for the last 5 years. Whatever issues one might have with Apple, they aren’t likely to apply to the company’s hardware, where performance and reliability have been top-notch. His skills may well translate to improving quality in other parts of the company.

Meanwhile, having Cook take over the executive chairman role, where Apple says he’ll continue to engage with policymakers worldwide, may take some of the attention off Ternus as CEO. Even if you don’t always agree with how Cook has navigated the global political rapids, there’s no question that Apple is in a position where politics plays an outsized role in the fate of the company. Offloading those tasks may help Ternus focus on the operational details of running Apple while he learns the ins and outs of interacting with governments worldwide.

Cook also wrote—and it really does feel like he wrote it—a Community Letter from Tim that introduces and praises Ternus personally, expresses his gratitude for the opportunity to serve as Apple’s CEO, and thanks the community for its support. It’s a nice, heartfelt piece.

I very much doubt we’ll see major changes at Apple once Ternus takes over because the company culture runs deep and its executive team has decades of experience. Ternus may be new to the CEO role, but he knows exactly how Apple works and is unlikely to modify that in any significant way—which, given the company’s current performance, is probably entirely appropriate.

In related news, Apple announced that Johny Srouji, the company’s senior vice president of Hardware Technologies and the executive behind Apple silicon, will take over Ternus’s previous role with the title of Chief Hardware Officer.

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As of this issue, TidBITS is celebrating 36 years of continuous publication, and amusingly, our sequential issue numbering simultaneously hit an even 1800. The human brain does so love numerical coincidence.

Whenever one of these anniversaries rolls around, I look back at what I’ve written in previous years to make sure whatever I say won’t repeat the same point. What I said about modeling the behavior you would like to see in the world in “Staying the Course After 35 Years of TidBITS” (18 April 2025) still holds. “34 Years of TidBITS and New Mac App Discounts for Members” (15 April 2024) was more of a numerical checkpoint, but its focus on the growth and importance of TidBITS Talk remains relevant. And while I have refined my thinking about AI since I wrote “33 Years of TidBITS: Handcrafted Content from Humans” (17 April 2023), I still can’t imagine how an AI could write from lived experience, as I did in my article about using AirPlay to find a dead mouse under our laundry room counter (see “Hunting for a Dead Mouse: AirPlay Receiver to the Rescue,” 6 February 2023).

While those thoughts from anniversary articles past continue to bounce around in my head, I’ve been focusing more on the importance of community of late, as I wrote in “What Apple’s 50th Anniversary Misses” (1 April 2026). I don’t have a lot more to say on that topic right now, other than to suggest that the world as we know it would like it to be is less directly threatened by AI, nuclear weapons, or even climate change than by people and what they choose to do or neglect. One thing that sets humans apart from all other living organisms is our capability to band together—for good or ill—in many different groups across space and time. So I encourage everyone reading this to think about what communities you participate in, how they make the world a better place, and what you can do to help them thrive.

Since you’re here, TidBITS is presumably one of those communities, so I have two small requests. First, one indication of a community’s strength is how long its members stay connected. I’d appreciate it if you could take this quick poll that asks when you started reading TidBITS. (Accuracy isn’t that important, so don’t stress if you can’t remember if it was 1993 or 1994, for instance.)

Second, if you have a story about how something you read in TidBITS or TidBITS Talk helped you out in a big way or made a significant impact on your life, please share it in the comments. Often, the impact of a community on an individual is visible only to that person, so the overall value becomes apparent only when people share how they’ve benefited.

Finally, I’d like to thank the 3472 TidBITS members for their financial support, which makes our work sustainable. If you value what we do and aren’t yet a member, we would welcome your support.

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A month ago, I received an interesting private message from Matt Sephton, a longtime contributor to TidBITS Talk. He was gearing up to release 18 (now 21) apps on the same day, and he was curious if I had any feedback. He had built the apps for his own use over the past 8 years, nearly all for the Mac. Friends had encouraged him to release them to the public, and he thought it would be amusing to release them all at once. (Spoiler: it wasn’t, which is why it took this long for him to get enough App Store approvals.)

I took a look and immediately realized that the title of Matt’s message to me, “Wall of Apps,” was extremely apt, given his website’s grid of app tiles. The apps address highly specific problems that he has faced over the years, such as Ditto, which lets you copy text twice to translate it, and Tabulator, which offers independent tab management for Safari. Some will primarily interest developers, such as Octoping, which provides a notification menu for GitHub, and others are for geeky admins, like Seeports, which puts a port inspector in your menu bar. The app that will likely appeal to the largest audience is one of the few iOS apps: PaperTrail, an iPhone client for the TaskPaper plain-text to-do list app for macOS made by Jesse Grosjean of Hog Bay Software.

Most of the apps felt too specific and quirky to review on their own—and there were too many of them—but they were so distinctive that I couldn’t resist the temptation to learn more. So instead of starting an article, I asked Matt if he’d like to talk about them on VidBITS. He was game, and our two-hour conversation far exceeded my expectations. Beyond the apps themselves, we covered his time as an Apple technology evangelist, his project cataloging 500+ Japanese Mac magazine cover discs, and an AI coding experiment in which Claude built two apps in 8 minutes that Matt then spent 8 hours refining. I think you’ll enjoy our discussion, and if any of his apps solve problems you have, I encourage you to check them out.

VidBITS: Matt Sephton's Wall of Tiny Apps

One of the most striking aspects of Matt’s apps is that they’re tiny in an era when even simple apps regularly run to hundreds of megabytes. He has written a Fits on a Floppy manifesto arguing that smaller apps download faster, launch instantly, use less memory, and run better on older systems. Nearly all of his apps would fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk. Matt even whipped up a free Fits on a Floppy screensaver—which is exactly 1.44 MB!—similar to After Dark’s Flying Toasters but featuring floppy disks bearing labels of actual classic Mac apps. (Look, there’s HyperCard! And StuffIt! And Speed Doubler! Must stop watching…)

Those who rail against software subscriptions will also be pleased to hear that all of Matt’s apps are either free or sold for a one-time price of $4.99, $9.99, or $14.99. All are in the App Store.

Finally, I wasn’t expecting to talk about digital art, but Matt thinks deeply—though not prescriptively—about technology and creation, and after our talk, I was intrigued to read his blog post about Barbara Nessim, a still-active artist who pioneered the use of computers in art in the early 1980s. Similarly, after we finished recording, Matt asked about “The Wave of the Future” poster on the wall behind me—Hokusai’s famous wave morphing into a digital representation. I’ve had it for decades but never knew its origin. Matt, who turns out to be a Hokusai aficionado, later sent me a link to the story of how the poster came to be. Ironically, this image evoking the analog-to-digital transition was created entirely by hand in 1981 because digital imaging was prohibitively expensive.

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This is why we can’t have nice things.

In our public SlackBITS group, I received a direct message from a user whose name rhymes with “Bob,” saying he had received a private invitation from Glenn Fleishman. Pleased to be included by an author whose writing he has followed for years, Bob clicked through to the promised Google Workspace… and ended up installing the OSX.Odyssey infostealer, even though he should have known better, being a Slack administrator, IT admin, and the privacy officer for his organization. Here’s what happened.

Bob was prompted to update a certificate via an installer and realized that he had installed malware when the Mac asked for permission to control the Finder and access Notes. He also heard the sound of files being moved around in the Finder. He turned off Wi-Fi and ran Malwarebytes, which identified OSX.Odyssey and quarantined the executable script. Unfortunately, OSX.Odyssey is thought to work nearly immediately, and he later found some invisible files in his home folder containing remote IP addresses, a remote username, and his Mac user password. Because his Mac had an Intune MDM profile installed, he sent a wipe command to the Mac, which executed as soon as he turned Wi-Fi back on. Fortunately, his Time Machine backup was only 24 hours old, and the drive hadn’t even been attached when the malware was active, so he could restore with confidence.

To play it safe and as penance for being careless, Bob has spent hours since changing all active passwords from his Passwords and 1Passwords accounts. That includes hundreds of logins, many SSH and API keys, and even credit card numbers. He replaced his debit card and locked his credit cards.

Investigating the Attack

How was such a tech-savvy user fooled? Impersonation-enabled social engineering. Needless to say, the real Glenn Fleishman did not send that message, but someone using a @glennfleishman handle, with Glenn’s photo in the profile, did. When I searched for Glenn’s name in SlackBITS, I found two users with the same handle who were almost identical. The main difference between Real Glenn’s profile (left) and Evil Glenn’s profile (right) is the email address, which is a little sketchy looking, but not obviously fake.

Upon close inspection, the message itself reads like it was written by AI. It doesn’t really say anything and uses overly earnest phrases like “genuinely interesting,” but again, it’s coming from a trusted person (Glenn) on a trusted messaging platform (Slack) run by a trusted organization (TidBITS). While Bob has read a lot of Glenn’s articles and books, he doesn’t know Glenn well enough to realize that there weren’t nearly enough puns in the message to be real. It’s easy to say, “Oh, I would never fall for that” (and others on SlackBITS did not), but you can see how the mistake was made.

Here’s where I have to acknowledge some culpability. We started SlackBITS a decade ago when Glenn wrote a book about Slack (see ““Take Control of Slack Basics” Serialized in TidBITS,” 9 March 2016). Although SlackBITS started strong and eventually attracted over 1400 users via public invitation links I published in TidBITS, it never really took off. Messages were generally few and far between, except during Apple events, when a bunch of TidBITS readers would gather to chat.

As a result, I didn’t check in on it regularly and failed to stay up to date on changes to admin options. SlackBITS was always intended to be public, but I didn’t know (or at least remember) that in 2017, Slack phased out unique usernames in favor of display names, which aren’t unique (the user ID remains unique). As a result, it was possible for Evil Glenn to join Slack, copy Glenn’s profile, and change his display name to @glennfleishman. As I untangled what happened, I found settings that would have blocked display name changes. They were enabled before I took this screenshot.

Slack’s admin logging is weak for free teams, but I did find evidence of the attacker joining the #general channel and changing his display name. I didn’t get a notification about that, and since SlackBITS wasn’t particularly active, I didn’t visit regularly enough to notice. Besides, I was at a conference Friday and Saturday, and I drove home all day Sunday, so it would have taken a lot more than this for me to realize something was amiss. And even if I had noticed, would I have seen this as a problem? Probably not.

Another factor that played into the entire sad story is that Slack isn’t designed for public use. It provides public invitation links and makes it easy for users to invite other users, but at its heart, Slack assumes it will be used internally within an organization. Particularly when used by a free team, it doesn’t have robust controls for tracking invitation usages, approving users, offering permissions levels, and logging actions.

It’s not just SlackBITS. I’ve heard from someone involved with another large public Slack group that its admins are also dealing with similar attacks.

Switching to Discourse Chat

In contrast, Discourse, which we use for TidBITS Talk, is intended for use by large numbers of potentially unvetted users. It has four trust levels with granular control over what users at different levels are allowed to do, assumes that some users could be bad actors, and offers excellent logging that even tracks changes to settings.

Because SlackBITS was used only for chatting during Apple events by relatively few people (only about 400 of the 1400 were in the #events channel, but many fewer than that actually participated), I’m hoping that the Discourse Chat plugin will be able to support us during Apple’s next live event, presumably the WWDC keynote in early June (see “WWDC 2026 Scheduled for June 8–12,” 23 March 2026).

I’ll start a new channel for that event, but in the meantime, if you’d like to play with the Discourse chat interface, you can join the general ChatBITS channel. It seems functional, though it doesn’t seem to provide the kind of notifications necessary for quick responses.

Shutting Down SlackBITS

Even though I’ve deactivated the Evil Glenn account and some others I felt were sketchy, there’s no way I can effectively evaluate over 1400 accounts. As a result, I’ve decided to shut SlackBITS down for good shortly. The minimal level of usage should mean that no one will be too inconvenienced, and Discourse now provides both traditional asynchronous forum discussions and a real-time chat interface for those who want them. Although Discourse also lets individual users direct message one another, I’ve now restricted those to higher trust levels.

Stay secure out there, folks, because we’re all in this together. Kevin Kelly has a nice essay entitled Your Security Is My Security, where he explains why he cares about the security of your machines:

Because the security of a network is only as good as its weakest link, and we are now running a global machine. That global machine, made up of your devices and yours and yours, is the machine I use. Everything connected to this global machine is on MY machine. Every device connected is linked to all the other devices. Therefore the security of everyone is hinged to the weakest security on the lowliest thing. That might be a connected pencil that could be hacked. If someone can hack a pencil they can use that exploit to hack into a drawing tablet and from there extend into an OS, and from there into the network. The weakness of one small point can ripple across the globe and affect me directly.

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Adobe has issued Lightroom Classic 15.3 with feature and performance improvements for the desktop-focused photo cataloging and editing app. The AI-powered Assisted Culling feature (which aids in selecting the best shots from a large set of images) improves handling of multiple reject reasons, provides greater control over exposure-related issues in the Reject section, and improves Subject Focus scoring for images with shallow depth of field. The release will now display AI Updates Required dialog box when exporting photos (if some selected images contain AI settings that need updating), adjusts Enhance features and AI adjustments that are applied through batch workflows to be run in the background, adds support for syncing PSB files, enables you to organize and create mood boards by adding Lightroom images to Firefly boards, provides better memory utilization for Full Screen Window, and updates slider performance to be interactive for global and local edits. ($9.99/$19.99/$59.99 monthly Creative Cloud subscription, free update for subscribers, release notes, macOS 14+)

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Apple has released maintenance updates for its professional video apps: Final Cut Pro 12.2, Compressor 5.2, and Motion 6.2. Final Cut Pro reduces startup time when launching with many Audio Units installed, adds a video tutorial on editing with the Magnetic Timeline, and resolves a crash that could occur when adjusting zoom levels in the timeline with Beat Detection enabled. Compressor removes support for H.264 for Blu-ray encoding, encoding H.264 interlaced video, Dolby Digital, and encoding to AVC-Intra on Apple silicon. Motion receives only unspecified stability improvements and bug fixes. All three apps are bundled with the Apple Creator Studio subscription, which costs $12.99 per month or $129 per year, and are also sold as standalone one-time purchases. (Free updates. Final Cut Pro, $299.99 new, 7.38 GB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Compressor, $49.99 new, 241.4 MB, release notes, macOS 14.6+; Motion, $49.99 new, 3.93 GB, release notes, macOS 15.6+)

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C-Command Software has published SpamSieve 3.3 with many changes to improve filtering accuracy. To improve search speed (and provide a more targeted search), the update now enables you to choose the search scope, enabling you to select from Subject, From, To, Matching Words, and other filters. You can also search by Raw Message Source and by Words, which can help find messages that were not correctly trained (see the new Searching section of the manual for more details).

The spam-filtering utility also optimizes SpamSieve’s message processing speed, improves SpamSieve’s recognition of headers from server spam filters, ensures searching by message identifier now works when there’s extraneous whitespace, improves error reporting for Apple Mail remote training, adds a workaround for App Nap pausing filtering, fixes a bug that could cause SpamSieve to show its Settings window when it was being launched by Apple Mail or Outlook, and resolves an issue where recent searches were not shown in the menu until after the first search. ($39.99 new with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 61.5 MB, release notes, macOS 10.13+)

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My latest strategy is to right click and select “block contact” on all of these, but I suspect that since they come in from new addresses daily, this is a pointless task and I’m wondering if I’m creating an enormous database of blocked addresses that my affect Apple Mail’s performance.

Anyway, my questions are:

1. Is there a better way to handle this?

2. Am I generating some enormous file that will eventually a problem?

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make me wonder if the product, despite assertions of health, is in danger and I should look for alternates instead of spending time exploring and using it. The post does sound like they are people of conviction, properly abiding by rules, and devoted to doing things right, which I appreciate, but haven’t followed them/used LO long enough to know if I can trust their words.

I have heard of something called OpenOffice, but haven’t tried it or researched it to know if it is also properly run. Does anyone have any further insight into the TDF situation or can endorse any other open source office suite?

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It’s much like using Slack or Messages or WhatsApp or any other real-time chat, complete with one level of threading, so sub-conversations can take place off to the side.

You can join the chat here:

I know very little about the chat experience, so let’s give it a try.

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The selection of the menu command simply does nothing, though last week it brought up the Save dialog as it always has. Google Chrome seemed to crash when I attempted to Save As… a PDF.

Since you probably have a browser window open as you read this, hopefully you can confirm that the function still works for you.

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——

I went to pay my taxes yesterday, here, and I get the message

Direct Pay

This Web site is experiencing technical difficulties. Visit Electronic Payment Options for alternative payment methods or come back later and try again.

Note that your tax payment is due regardless of IRS Direct Pay online availability.

I did some searching at Reddit, and, by god, the IRS site was reported down intermittently yesterday (April 14).

But it turns out that this is the message you always get if you use Safari. I paid my taxes using Chrome.

I know that the government has fired anyone with more than a minimal IQ, but whom do I complain to?

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I believe this behavior began in macOS version 26.4.x: When I unmount a drive, it does appear to be unmounted, but, the drive becomes mounted again, when, for me, the Mac awakens from sleep.

Actually, there does seems to be at least one triggering mechanism, which re-mounts the drive, after being unmounted. For example, if you put the Mac to sleep, when you wake it up, the previously unmounted drives, once again appear mounted. I am not sure if there are any other triggering mechanisms.

I have two Macs, a 2020 Mac-Mini M1, and a 2022 MacBook Air M2, both running macOS 26.4.1, and the problem appears on both Macs.

Background: I believed what happened is the following: Apple was trying to fix a problem, in that for some users, it was difficult (or impossible) to get some drives to mount. So in trying to “fix” this problem, Apple created a new problem/bug, in which the opposite condition gets created, that is, now (once the triggering new bug occurs, for example, awakening from sleep), a previously unmounted drive becomes mounted, regardless. Note: I had never experienced the original problem Apple was trying to fix in this case, that is, I never had a problem mounting a drive, when I needed the drive access.

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It has been a tough few weeks for Mac writers. On 26 March 2026, John Martellaro died, followed by Chuck La Tournous on 3 April 2026. I didn’t know either one well, although John wrote what he subsequently told me was his first-ever industry piece for TidBITS back in 1996 (see “Dream to be Different,” 9 September 1996). It captures some of the idealism of Apple’s early days while bemoaning how Apple had lost its way, trading inspiration and wonder for price-cutting. It’s a reminder of how we have long built up Apple as a paragon of virtue, only to be disappointed when the company acts like, well, a company.

John went on to write numerous pieces for The Mac Observer, which also counted Chuck among its contributing editors. Tonya and I knew Chuck mostly as the bass player in the Macworld All-Star Band, which brought together an eclectic collection of Mac writers to play at Macworld Expo parties. John was likely in his late 70s or early 80s, while Chuck was only 64—a particularly tragic loss for his family and the community.

Bryan Chaffin, who was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Mac Observer, has written touching remembrances of both John and Chuck, the latter of which points to a pair of pandemic-era videos from the Macworld All-Star Band. Let’s all listen in and raise a toast to their memory.

The Macworld All-Star Band - Take Me To The River

The Macworld All-Star Band - Feelin' Alright

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This was the Unix “best practices” location for storing such scripts, when I was working on Unix workstations and Linux boxes. When OS X came along, I checked around (e.g., the O’Reilly books), and they confirmed that /usr/local/bin was where I should be placing them.

Is this still the case for modern macOS versions? I seem to remember that when Monterey came along, there were warnings that, because of SIP, they should be stored somewhere else. And I notice Homebrew stores their apps under /opt.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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First, and by a wide margin: keep your devices up to date. This is the single most important thing, and it is not new advice.

I question this advice. If one is way behind, what is the danger of new exploits? In fact, evil hackers may ignore my version of the OS since it might be more secure and also a smaller target in terms of less users. Isn’t true that most dangerous risks these days come from new releases?

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Dear Tim Apple, in the interest of your paying customers and their user experience, I expect you to give us a toggle to turn this off. And while you’re at it, make sure to also give us a toggle to turn off ads in the App Store.

Image courtesy of https://www.macrumors.com/2026/04/13/ios-26-2-beta-2-apple-maps-ads/

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Sonny Software has released Bookends 15.3.2 with a new AppleScript command to sync a library. The reference management tool updates smart groups to include searches performed by other smart groups, adds an option that allows you to create custom names for files containing extracted PDF annotations and notes updates ISBN Quick Add ISBN with changes made by Google Books, updates all AI functions to work better with changes introduced in the macOS 26.4 Tahoe Foundation Models, increases the timeout limit for fetching data from OpenAlex, and fixes a bug in Autofill from a PDF using AI when a PMID was found. ($74.99 new with a 25% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 128.9 MB, release notes, macOS 11+)

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Rogue Amoeba has issued Audio Hijack 4.5.7 with updates to the user interface. The full-featured audio recording app declutters the menus in macOS 26 Tahoe (removing the Apple menu item icons), swaps update dialogs for a small “Update Available” indicator in window title bars, updates the slider knob to move by 0.1x when holding the Option key in conjunction with arrow key presses, improves launching an application source with the Open URL option (in particular starting a radio stream when Apple Music is launched), addresses issue where certain third-party Audio Unit effects would fail to load, and resolves several rare crashes. ($64 new with a 20% discount for TidBITS members, free update, 27.7 MB, release notes, macOS 14.4+)

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Those who keep more than a handful of tabs open in their Web browser should investigate vertical tabs, as I encouraged in “A Roundup of Vertical Tab Support in Mac Web Browsers” (5 June 2023). Prompted by the addition of vertical tabs to Google Chrome, The Verge’s David Pierce has now penned “Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them,” echoing my argument for them in “Arc Will Change the Way You Work on the Web” (1 May 2023) when he writes:

All of this is to say: Vertical tabs are better and you should use them. It’s a simple matter of screen real estate. Virtually every modern computer display is widescreen, which is to say it’s wider than it is tall. Websites and web apps, meanwhile, are practically always vertical experiences. Whether you’re on a 13-inch laptop or a 32-inch behemoth of a monitor, the space from top to bottom of your computer is more precious than the space from left to right.

He also notes that vertical tabs are easier to manage because you can actually read their titles (words for the win!), work with tab groups more easily, and use browsers more like other apps, many of which feature sidebars.

Given how common vertical tab support was even back in 2023, it’s amazing that it took Google this long to join the parade. Chrome users who would like to try vertical tabs can Control-click the tab bar and choose Show Tabs Vertically. If Show Tabs Vertically doesn’t appear for you yet (as it didn’t for me), navigate to chrome://flags, search for “vertical,” choose Enabled from the pop-up menu, and relaunch Chrome. Once you do that, Show Tabs Vertically should show up in the tab bar’s contextual menu.

Note the mishmash of horizontal tabs at the top of that window above. I’d never be able to find anything in there. However, after switching to vertical tabs, Chrome gains a sidebar with tab entries that combine teensy-tiny favicons with names that clarify exactly what each tab is. Pinned tabs appear at the top with only their favicons; the assumption is that if you use a site often enough to pin its tab, you’ll recognize its favicon. Chrome also lets you add tabs to groups for a bit of hierarchy, open them side-by-side in a split view, and perform simple tab management. It’s no Arc, but the basics are there.

And if you try vertical tabs and decide they’re not for you, just Control-click the tab bar and choose Show Tabs Horizontally to put Chrome back the way it was.

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