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Firefox 3.7 Nightlies Showcase Better UI Customizability

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:11:41 +0000

Customizations have always been a core aspect of the Firefox web browser. Up until now it was possible to drag and drop some user interface elements, like bookmarks or search bars into other toolbars. It was furthermore possible to use CSS styling to change other elements (like font sizes for instance) as well. But then there were also elements that could not be moved at all. The tabbar for instance was such an element.

The latest Firefox 3.7 nightlies (called firefox-3.7a5pre) enables customizations for additional elements that could not be moved at all previously. It is now for instance possible to move the new tab and list tabs buttons from the Firefox tabbar into another toolbar.

More interesting than this, especially in situations where screen estate is a premium is the ability to move elements into the tabbar which actually makes it possible to place all visible navigational elements into one toolbar in the Firefox web browser.

Moving all elements into the tabbar has consequences on the other hand, especially in situations where many tabs are opened at the same time as they reduce the width of forms to a minimum making it extremely difficulty to enter new urls or perform searches.

Mozilla Links has information about the other changes in this new release:

On Windows, you can also notice the slightly updated tabs style: more separated and rounded and more contrast for the active tab.
Important changes are still to come for tabs including nice animations when adding, closing and moving tabs, and Aero Glass for all toolbars on Windows Vista and 7.

Which brings us to an interesting question. How would your browser look like if all browser toolbars and elements were customizable?

I for one would love to see an option to integrate the titlebar into one of the bars, maybe make it fixed to a toolbars background or something like that.

Users interested in this latest feature can download the pre release of Firefox 3.7 alpha from the Mozilla ftp site. (via Mozillalinks)

Update: Make sure you use a different user profile or portable version for testing. It otherwise could impact another installed version of Firefox.

Sort Tabs In Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:23:49 +0000

If you are one of those Firefox users who likes to have dozens of tabs open in the Firefox tabbar then you might have sometimes lost track of where specific websites where located in the tabbar. Options were to simply click through the tabs one by one until the right tab was found, to use an add-on that would search in the tabs or use a tab preview feature like those implemented in Firefox 3.6.

Sort Tabs offers another option. The Firefox add-on adds the option to sort all open tabs in the Firefox web browser. The tab sorting option is added to the right-click menu when right-clicking the tabbar. The option provided is to sort the tabs by url. There is unfortunately no option to change the sorting criteria to another value like page title or age.

This will sort all open tabs in Firefox. It did even move locked tabs (locked with App Tabs) to their appropriate place based on their url. It could therefor also affect other add-ons that lock tabs in the Firefox tabbar.

The only other options that are provided by the Sort Tabs add-on are to close blank tabs and duplicate tabs when the tabs are sorted by the add-on. It is also possible to reverse the sort order in the options.

Sort Tabs is available for download at the Mozilla Firefox website. It is compatible with all Firefox 3.x versions.

Update: Sort Tabs has been discontinued. An alternative is the Group / Sort Tabs add-on which offers a similar functionality.

Hide The Firefox Tabbar

Martin Brinkmann — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:22:06 +0000

The Firefox tabbar is always visible in the web browser unless it is permanently deactivated in the View menu. It does not really make sense to deactivate it unless there is never more than one website open on the computer system. What’s missing is an easy way of hiding the Firefox tabbar when it is not needed and displaying it again when it is.

That’s exactly what the experimental Firefox add-on Hide Tabbar is doing. Hide Tabbar works by configuring a keyboard shortcut to hide and display the tabbar in the web browser. The default combination has been set to CTRL F11 which is not that comfortable as it can only be accessed with both hands.

The keyboard shortcut can be changed easily in the options of the add-on so that only one hand is needed to hide and display the tabbar in Firefox. Hide Tabbar offers an auto-hide function as well which will automatically hide the Firefox tabbar after a certain time. The tabbar will be displayed again if the user hovers the mouse cursor over the area were it was initially displayed.

Hide Tabbar is an experimental add-on for the Firefox web browser that is compatible with all versions of Firefox.