Actually this behaviour has bothered me too in the properties panel. What good is it to have an empty area and then having to scroll up to see something? Maybe there could be a condition if there's nothing to show then scroll all the way up, where there is something, else keep the scroll position.

may by save scrol position for every tab?

While this feature has good intentions and can be nice (such as in the Properties editor) I think it's outlived it's usefulness. Particularly now that we have tabs, the goal is to reduce and/or remove scrolling entirely, so we should not worry so much about saving scroll position. I think it's better that panels are always scrolled to the top when switching tabs.

Relevent to this task:
It maybe could be useful if you saved the scroll position to individual tabs,but even then with pinned panels and such it seems very hard to get right...

Maybe indeed it should go for now.

Relevent to general vertical tabs:
I'm sorry for posting the next part of my comment here but I couldn't find any general vertical tabs task that was relevant still open and being commented in.
If there is a better place please say so.

I tested what I believe is the current version of the vertical tabs

I have a few concerns.

1)Keep Pinned tabs on top
Pinned panels are sometimes added below other panels. On top seems better to keep it consistant and predictable (maybe a RMB toggle option if this is a source of strife?)

2)option to Shift+click tabs or click+drag tabs (like with layer selection or outliner )
Those tabs will then show all selected tabs underneath each other without having to pin them all.

This point is the most important one,I feel. Because If someone would rather scroll and keep the toolshelf the way it is now this is the way to do it. Just exlude or include the tabs you want shown. It's an important difference in flexibility to pinned tabs

3) Quick operations to make managing tabs and panels easier.

Probably via RMB menu RMB additions.

• Collapse all panels
• Show all panels
• Toggle panel visibility (hidden get shown,shown get hidden)
• unpin all panels
• Select ALL tabs
• Unselect all tabs save the current one

(there might be more)

4)Keyboard shortcutable operations
Make nr 3) shortcut-able

5)show the current panel operations shorcuts in the RMB!
(zoom in/out , reset, hide all other panels...)

Blender needs to communicate this functionality!

6)Double CTRL+click on panel should show all other panels
CTRL click hides all other panels but one-> maybe Double CTRL+click could do the reverse to show all other panels quickly.

7) Where are the UI improvements made by that GSOC student?

There were quite a few powerful things he showed (operator improvements, pressing an icon on a closed panel to see it's contents)....,and like some of vino's changes the year before that (x's in lists to delete content easier), they are once again lost to Blender,with no explanation (as far as I know)

Ending comments
with my suggestions the RMB menu might be a bit more crowded but no
more so than the Shift+A menu. Just order them well and you will give
the users a useful tool to interact and discover the different functions
of the tabs. If you keep them as they are,they won't be any fun to use
and will lead to much clicking.

Other then that I don't really mind how it looks,horizontal or
otherwise,icons or no icons. I mostly care about more functionality and
giving power to the user.