Firefox Showcase Extension
This extension is sweet. If you like to open many tabs at once and flip around while surfing you might encounter the problem that you can't find a certain article in the massive amount of tabs that are open at the time. I usually flip through them until I find the article that I was searching for. Takes a lot of time and I always was hoping for an extension that would help me optimize this procedure.
Showcase is the savior. The Firefox extension works with all versions of the browser and is regularly updated to keep it that way. It is capable of displaying all open tabs either in the sidebar, a tab or a new window. Clicking on one of the images of your open tabs will bring that tab to the front. Right-Clicking a thumbnail will give you additional options like saving that page to the bookmarks, delete the tab or save the page.
Showcase comes with its own Options menu which looks very much like the original Firefox options menu. It has so many entries and tabs that it is impossible to write about each here. Just take a look at them and see for yourself. What can I say, I love it.
You have multiple options to use the feature in Firefox.
- Press Alt and use the View > Showcase menu to launch it.
- Use Showcase all Windows shortcut F12.
- Open Showcase with Shift-F12.
- Showcase a tab with Ctrl-Alt-Y.
- Showcase all tabs of the current window with Ctrl-Alt-T.
Update: We have changed the Showcase extension link to the official Mozilla add-ons repository for security reasons. The extension is still fully compatible with recent versions of the Firefox web browser, including the latest stable version Firefox 13 (at the time of writing July 2012).
Mozilla in the meantime has created a similar add-on for better tab management called Panorama. You can check out about Firefox Tab Sets here. It basically displays a list of all open tabs, and lets you create tab groups for faster access and better manageability in the browser.
Tips
- You can enable thumbnail caching to speed up things when you are using the feature.
- Define mouse actions under Thumbnails > Mouse. You can change the left, middle and right click action here.
- Settings can be exported so that you can use the exact same ones on other devices.
- You can display all tab thumbnails in the sidebar as well. Just press the Alt key, and select Sidebar > Showcase Sidebar here to do so.
