You can now access vertical tabs in Microsoft Edge

It has been a few months since Microsoft told us about the impending arrival of a vertical tab option in its Edge browser. Things have been a little quiet on this front since, but now it is possible to change the way your tabs are organised.

Microsoft says that the vertical alignment of tabs can help to improve work efficiency, but there are also aesthetic benefits that many people will appreciate. One key benefit of the vertical arrangement is that it makes it easier to manage large numbers of tabs simultaneously, and not run into the problem of shrinking tabs hiding labels.

The arrival of vertical tabs is the first time such an option has been available in what would be considered a mainstream browser. Sure, there is a comparable option in the Chromium-based Vivaldi, but this is quite a long way from a mainstream, widely used app.

Arranging tabs vertically makes much better usage of the extra horizontal space we all now enjoy thanks to the prevalence of widescreen – or ultra-widescreen – monitors. It makes it much easier to identify tabs at a glance, without having to rely on favicons to help you work out which site a tab relates to.

A new vertical

While Microsoft has started to give Edge users accesses to vertical tabs, it's not something that is going to be available to everyone straight away. In fact, you'll have to be running the Canary build of Microsoft Edge, which you can download from here.

With the correct version of the browser installed, you will then have to use the following steps to enable a hidden, experimental setting that enables vertical tabs:

Launch Edge Canary and pay a visit to edge://flags
Search for the word shy and use the dropdown menus to enable the Enable Fullscreen dropdown and Enable Swipe to ShyUI options
Restart Edge