The Firefox add-on NOverflow takes the concept a step further by dynamically changing the tab width values. The add-on, instead of letting Firefox hide tabs in the tabbar, reduces the minimum tab width whenever necessary to keep all tabs visible on the screen. And when you start closing tabs, the width of the remaining tabs is adjusted again to use the freed room on the tabbar.

This works well for a medium amount of open tabs. Once you reach an upper limit, scrolling buttons are displayed again to scroll to the left or right. A quick test revealed that about twice the number of tabs were displayed at the same time with the extension installed. It should be noted though that this is only valid if the minimum width has not been altered previously.

The core benefit of the extension over adjusting the width of the tabs in the stylesheet is accessibility. All it takes is to install the add-on to get the tabs width adjusted automatically from that moment on. Tech savvy users may prefer to edit the stylesheet directly instead, as it will free up some ram and maybe even cpu that the add-on requires when running.

You can change the minimum width in the add-on’s options. It is set to 54 pixels which is nearly half of Firefox’s default value of 100 pixels. You can reduce the size to 36 pixels which would nearly triple the maximum number of visible tabs in the browser, or increase it to 72 pixels.

The remaining options let you hide blank favicons from tabs, the close button from the active tab and to use slimmer pinned tabs.

Firefox users who want to give it a try can download and install NOverflow from the official Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.

There are built-in options to handle or mitigate the issue. From altering the browsers minimum tab width to display more tabs at the same time on the screen over extensions like Tab Mix Plus to display multiple rows of tabs, to Firefox’s Panorama feature to group tabs.

The Firefox add-on Tabby2 offers another approach. The shortcut driven extension displays a list of open extension on the screen whenever the shortcut is used. The list displays all open tabs at the bottom of the screen utilizing all of the screen estate of the browser.

Only the tabs of the active Firefox window are displayed. A filter at the bottom of the screen can be used to find specific pages quickly. Both the page title and web address are used by the filter.

A left-click on a tab in the list switches automatically to that tab in the browser. Middle-click and right-click on the other hand open a blank new tab in the browser or delete the active tab automatically.

Options are available to change the extension’s default access key (from Ctrl+’ to another keyboard shortcut), and to define the maximum number of lines that are displayed in the tab list. The default value is set to 25 tab lines.

The options highlight the keyboard shortcuts for creating (Insert) and deleting (Delete) tabs as well. The functions are only available when the tab list is open.

The tab listing and filtering options are very responsive, and unobtrusive at the same time. The tab listing and filtering happens instantly.

Firefox users can download Tabby2 from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

Then I discovered that there is an easier way that would optimize that workflow significantly. I started to test holding down Shift, Alt, Cltr plus Enter combinations until I found the combination that would open the typed in text in a new tab page and not the active one.

Firefox users can either hold down Alt before they press enter or the Alt Gr key to open the entered text in a new browser tab. Website addresses (urls) are automatically loaded in the new tab while searches load the results of the default search engine instead in the new tab. Firefox will automatically switch to the new tab and restore the url text in the tab the text was entered in.

Do you prefer to open new tabs in the background instead of the foreground? No problem, all you need to do is to make a slight configuration change. Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit enter. First time users need to confirm that they will be careful. Enter the parameter browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground in the filter bar on top. Only one entry is returned.

The default setting is false, which basically means that new tabs are not opened in the background. A double-click on the parameter changes the value to true which has the consequence that new tabs are opened in the background instead.

Double Click Close Tab is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that adds additional tab closing options to the browser. A double-click on a site in the tabbar closes that tab automatically in the browser. While that’s more convenient than using the right-click context menu it is not the most efficient option that the extension provides.

Closing tabs by moving the mouse to the tabbar to either double-click or click on the x icon is inefficient because of that initial mouse movement. The keyboard shortcut works directly but can only close the active tab.

Double Click Close Tab adds two additional tab closing options to Firefox. Users can alternatively triple left-click anywhere on the page to close the active tab. This may interfere with some actions in the browser, for instance double-clicking on text to highlight it. If you click three times instead of two, which can happen, you’d inadvertently close the current website instead.

The options of the add-on provide preferences to change the default behavior. Both the default tab clicking and on page clicking behavior can be altered there. Alternatives are a single middle-click, double right-clicks or triple right-clicks.

It is furthermore possible to disable one of the tab closing options completely, and to change the triple click time (that is the time in which three clicks need to be registered).

Double Click Close Tab can be downloaded and installed directly at the Mozilla add-on repository.

The script that was used in the test is linked on Gregor’s site so that users can try the test on their systems as well.

A recent Firefox Nightly and a Google Chrome Canary version where used in the test. How did the two browser’s perform? The time command returned the following values:

• Firefox: real 6m14.406s – user 3m55.302s – sys 0m49.366s
• Chrome: real 28m55.573s – user 21m58.383s – sys 14m40.860s

Gregor noticed a significant slow-down at the 70 open pages mark in the Chrome browser. At 150 pages open, it was not possible to scroll on a page. Firefox on the other hand was “still pretty snappy and scrolling is like there is no other open tab”.

Gregor then looked at the memory usage of the browser. Turned out that Firefox used 27 threads and total of 2.02 Gigabytes of RAM for all 150 open tabs. The Chrome browser, with its multi-process architecture used “a little bit” over 5 Gigabytes of memory with 150 tabs open.

One could argue that the test is not really replicating real world browser usage, and that’s definitely correct. It is however still remarkable that Chrome does not really scale that well despite its multi-process rendering architecture.

Firefox was able to complete the V8 benchmark test with 150 tabs open, while Chrome stopped rendering while staying at a 100% cpu performance.

Has anyone ever opened more than 70 tabs in the Chrome browser? If so, what was your experience?

Firefox users can make use of the browser’s excellent customizability to counter some of those effects. It is for instance possible to reduce the width of each tab in the browser to make room for more websites on the visble tabbar, pin tabs that are always open to reduce their width or to install add-ons like Tab Utilities that support multi-row tabbars.

The Focus Last Selected Tab add-on for Firefox adds three comfortable options to Firefox’s tabbar:

• Focus last selected tab: This puts the focus back on the last active tab if you close the current tab.
• Tab flipping: A click on the current tab displays the last active tab on the screen. Another click displays the current website again.
• Restore recently closed tab: A middle click on an empty area on the tab bar restores the last closed tab in the browser.

Firefox users can disable some of the functionality in the extension’s options. Here they can also enable faster tab flipping which switches tab when the mouse button is pushed down, and not when it is released. The developer notes that this disables Firefox’s drag and drop feature.

The keyboard shortcut Ctrl+ that is enabled by default is not working on the other hand. Firefox users Ctrl+ to zoom in on a page, and it is likely that a conflict prevents this from working properly.

Update: The keyboard shortcut is Ctrl..

The feature that I personally like is the ability to switch between two tabs by clicking on one of the tabs on the tab bar.

Firefox users can download and install the Focus Last Selected Tab add-on from the official Mozilla add-on repository.

There is also the option to click on a tab directly with the mouse to open it. Some users however may prefer to use the mouse-wheel to flip through tabs. That’s what the Firefox extension roTab offers.

Once installed, it adds two options to the browser to flip through all Firefox tabs with the mouse-wheel.

You can flip through all tabs by hovering over the tabbar. Moving the mouse-wheel down flips through the tabs in a forward motion while up does the opposite of that.

You can alternatively use the keyboard in combination with the mouse-wheel to scroll through all open tabs without hovering the mouse cursor on the tabbar first.

The default modifier ist Shift-Ctrl. If you press those two keys you can use the mouse-wheel to scroll through all open tabs.

The modifiers and other options can be changed in the add-on options. Available as the hotkey is a combination of Shift, Ctrl, Alt or Meta.

It is furthermore possible to disable either the scrolling on hover or the scrolling when modifiers are used in the options.

App Tabs are handled like normal tabs by default, which can be changed to either ignore them completely or to use another modifier to scroll through them.

The scrolling itself is fluent with no delays or interruptions, regardless of the method used to scroll.

The add-on roTab can be installed directly at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository. It is compatible with all versions of the Firefox web browser from version 4 on.

That’s inconsistent and something that has bothered me for quote some time. See, I use the Multi Links add-on for Firefox to open multiple links at once in the browser. These often open at the end of the tab row which is not how I want it to be.

Lets take a look at the available options in Firefox. The Tools > Options > Tab menu offers no help. It offers general tab related settings but no configuration option to change the way new tabs are opened.

The only other built-in option is to enter about:config in the Firefox address bar, hit enter, confirm the notification if it appears and filter for the term “browser.tabs”. Please note that this has only been tested under Firefox 4, the parameters may be different under Firefox 3.6.

Locate the browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent parameter. It is set to True which is the default behavior. True basically means that related tabs will be opened to the right of the current tab. Firefox users who want to change that behavior can double-click the parameter to set the value from true to false.

False means that all tabs are opened at the end of the tab row.

But what about users who want new tabs to always open direct next to the active tab?

Those users need to install an add-on, like the restartless Always Right add-on. The Firefox extension configures the browser to open all tabs, regardless of their relation to the active tab, to the direct right of the active tab.

There you have it. Users who want all tabs to open at the end of the tabbar need to make the change in the about:config dialog, users who prefer that all tabs open directly next to the active tab need to use an extension for that.

What’s left to say? How do you like your tabs?

I did seem to recall however that this setting was available in the advanced configuration of the web browser. I’m not sure if I have written a guide in the past about this. I think I did but I cannot find it.

Firefox offers two parameters to change the minimum and maximum tab width of the browser. To change these parameters users need to enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit enter. This opens the advanced configuration. Users who never opened the configuration before see a warning page before the configuration is displayed to them.

The configuration holds many parameters and it is usually a good idea to use the filter at the top to display only those parameters that need to be edited. Enter browser.tabs.tab in the filter form, this should display the following parameters:

browser.tabs.tabMaxWidth defines the maximum width of each individual tab in the browser. The default value is set to 250 pixels.

browser.tabs.tabMinWidth defines the minimum width of each tab in the Firefox web browser. The default value is set to 100 pixels.

Why is there a minimum and maximum value for the tab width? Firefox changes the size of the tabs dynamically based on those values. A few open tabs are shown with 250 pixels which is reduced gradually until the minimum width 100 is reached.

A good value for the minimum width parameter is 25 which reveals enough so that the tabs can be identified. Some users may want to reduce the minimum width so that only the favicon of the site is displayed. These users need to reduce the minimum width further and test the setting with dozens of open tabs.

Update: The parameters are no longer working in Firefox 4 or newer versions of the web browser. The only available option is to use CSS to define the maximum and minimum tab width. The following entries need to be added to the userChrome.css file in the Firefox profile folder:

.tabbrowser-tab:not([pinned]) {
max-width: 250px !important;
min-width: 40px !important;
}

The easiest way to find the right profile directory is to enter about:support in the address bar to load the page. It contains, among other options, a button to open the active profile directory. Open the Chrome subfolder and look for the file userChrome.css. If it does not exist create it. This is best done by creating a new text document and renaming its name and file extension. Windows users right-click in the directory and select New > Text Document.

Now copy and paste the code into the file. You can append the CSS code at the bottom in case the file existed previously. Please note that the above instructions change the maximum width to 250 pixels, and the minimum width to 40 pixels. You may want to play around with the values to find the one best suitable for you. Restart the browser after making the change to see the changes in action.

It does not really make sense to keep all tabs in the RAM all the time. Think about it. The monitor resolution limits the number of tabs that are shown to the user at the same time in default view. And practically, there can only be one active tab per browser window.

An extension to load tabs on demand is the next best thing, to a browser that uses an algorithm to only keep the active tab and the most likely to be opened tabs in memory.

BarTab does that. The extension has been this popular, that the developers have included part of its code in the upcoming Firefox 4 browser.

The extension offers more features and improvements, unlike Mozilla’s implementation, which only uses the functionality for the browser’s session restore.

The core functionality is similar though. BarTab basically offers functionality to keep only some of the tabs in memory. On session restore for instance, it will only load the first tab in the memory. All remaining tabs are restored but inactive. This speeds up the session restore in the browser noticeably.

This core functionality, and a lot more can be configured in the add-on’s preferences. But more about that later. A click on an unloaded tab in the browser loads it immediately. This means it will take longer to access tabs that are not loaded. The time depends largely on the speed of the Internet connection. New tabs are automatically loaded which is the default functionality in the browser. One interesting feature is the ability to unload tabs after a certain amount of inactivity. This is set to ten minutes by default, which means that active tabs that have not been visited in the last ten minutes will be unloaded automatically by the add-on.

bartab

Some users may have sites open that they want to access all the time. The preferences have an option to whitelist domains, so that they are not unloaded after inactivity, and always loaded if tabs are restored from a previous browsing session.

But how effective is the BarTab add-on? Can it be used to save RAM and cpu utilization while working with the Firefox browser?

• BarTab active, 1 tab loaded, 10 tabs unloaded, 110-130 Megabytes of RAM
• BarTab inactive, 11 tabs loaded 150-180 Megabytes of RAM

BarTab can save computer memory, and speed up session restores in the browser. The effectiveness of the add-on increases with the number of tabs open at the same time. The more it can unload, the better the effect on the browser’s memory usage. Firefox users with lots of open tabs, and users with computer’s that have a low amount of RAM will benefit from this add-on the most.

BarTab is available for Firefox 3 and Firefox 4 at the official Mozilla Add-on Repository.

When you start Firefox for the first time, you will notice a new option in the right-click menu of the browser when hovering over a tab. At the very top is a new entry, to “move this tab to” a tab set. Only the create new group option is accessible at this time. Nothing happens after selecting the option, which may confuse a lot of Firefox users who try the option for the first time.

The real magic happens in the Tab View window. This window can be accessed from a toolbar button and the View > Tab View menu (again at the very top).

tab sets

In theory, all open websites should be displayed in tab view. The display appears to be a bit buggy at the moment, as not all tabs were displayed during our tests, or at least not at immediately. Furthermore, the close tab set button did not work at this time, clicking on the close icon did nothing.

firefox tab sets

The visible websites are shown with thumbnail screenshots which can be moved around freely. It is for instance possible to move a website from one tab set to another, increase the size of a tab set to increase the size of the thumbnails, place tab sets over other tab sets and so on.

The tabs can be named in Tab View, for better identification purposes, and the option to add a new tab directly to one of the existing groups.

A click on a page in Tab View brings that tab set to the front with the selected page as the active tab. All other tabs are not shown in that view mode.

Creating a new tab in an existing Tab Set adds that tab automatically to it, which reduces the manual juggling.

It will take some time to get used to the Tab Sets feature, largely because it means more juggling around with different tab sets windows. Say you have three tab sets: Work, Shopping and Entertainment.

If you are currently in work, and want to switch to a website in shopping or entertainment you need to press the button in the Firefox toolbar, or use the View menu. Then you need to select the new tab set so that it opens. If you want to switch back, you need to perform the same operation again. Actually, you need to do it every time you want to switch.

The above statement is not entirely true in Windows 7, which displays all open tabs in the taskbar, so that they can be selected directly.

How are tab sets then different from say, using multiple Firefox windows for different online activities?

Windows seem to be more flexible than tab sets. It is for instance possible to place two Firefox windows next to each other, which is not possible with Tab Sets. Windows can also be displayed easier, considering that a click in the taskbar will do that.

How about the ability to open multiple websites with saved tab sets? That can be done by adding all websites to a bookmarks folder and middle-clicking it.

App Tabs, another new feature similar to Chrome’s Pin Tab feature, offers to configure specific tabs to be always displayed in the browser. That’s handy for services that may be needed while working in different tab sets.

Tab Sets at this point in development seem to offer no value other than adding eye candy to the Firefox web browser, which is something that we have criticized in the past.

The small bugs encountered in the nightlies will be fixed in the release version, the usability problems on the other hand may turn Tab Sets into another Firefox feature that is barely used by anyone.

Fixes

What we would like to see:

• Ability to create named tab sets directly from the Move This Tab To menu, even if that means using the active page title as a temporary set name.
• Keyboard shortcuts to switch between tab sets faster.
• Option to display two Tab Sets next to each other, and to merge tab sets more easily.
• Option to disable Tab Sets in the browser
• A text only Tab Sets configuration window for faster configuration without eye candy.
• Option to open bookmarks in a specific tab set

Firefox users who want to test Tab Sets in the browser need to download the latest Nightly Builds from the official website to do so.

What’s your take on Tab Sets?

The benefit of running tabs in the sidebar, either left or right, is the same as running the Windows Taskbar at the left or right side of the computer screen: Space.

A vertical placement can display more information and more tabs openly than a horizontal tab bar can.

firefox tabs sidebar

This is especially obvious if the computer uses a widescreen monitor, as most websites do not make use of the full screen width, especially on large resolutions such as 1920×1200. This resolution for instance often means more than 400pixels of white space on the left and right side, if the browser is running in full screen mode. The display width is usually sufficient to display all website contents on the screen, the height however is not. More horizontal space means that the website has more space to display.

Rarst has already mentioned how to switch to a vertical tab bar in Opera ( Right-click tab bar > Tab Bar Placement). I have decided to take a look at the Firefox browser instead.

Firefox does not offer vertical tab placements out of the box. Add-ons have been created that can move the tabs to a sidebar. One of the add-ons is Tab Kit.

The add-on automatically moves the tab bar to the left sidebar upon installation and restart of the web browser.

The colors that are initially displayed can be deactivated, the position of the bar switched to the right side, top (default position, or bottom.

The display can be further customized in the options. It is here for instance possible, and advised, to display a close button next to each tab. By default, the close button is only displayed at the bottom of the screen, which is not very functional to say the least.

tab kit

Tab Kit supports mouse gestured to quickly switch between tabs, and it is of course still possible to display the first ten tabs by pressing CTRl-[1-9] on the keyboard.

The benefits of running tabs in the sidebar

Below are the benefits of running tabs in the sidebar, the disadvantages or situations where you should not do that are listed in the next paragraph instead.

• If lots of tabs are often open at the same time, especially if that means that not all tabs are displayed all the time in the horizontal bar.
• If width is not a issue, e.g. on widescreen monitors.
• If every pixel of height is of importance.
• If you prefer to have the page titles visible all the time

When you should not run tabs in sidebar

There are situations where it is not advised to run tabs in a sidebar.

• If the computer monitor is only capable of small resolutions, e.g. 1024×768.
• If only a handful of tabs are opened all the time
• If the sidebars are already occupied
• If the user likes to align windows on the screen so that the web browser is only displayed in part of it.

There is one last thing to address. Should you place the tab bar in the left or right sidebar? This again depends on a few factors. If the left sidebar is already occupied you may want to move it to the right. The right side has the additional advantage that the scrollbar is there as well, which usually means that the mouse is often located in that area to navigate the page.

The left sidebar placement on the other hand is closer to the browser menus and the url form. It is however more distracting on the left, especially in the beginning after making the switch.

Where is your tabbar located? Are you using a vertical or horizontal placement, and why?

Loading all tabs at the same time works fine if the tab count is low but it prolongs the loading time if it is high. Firefox users who use the Multi Links add-on or a similar add-on which allows them to open multiple links at once in new tabs might also experience a slow loading time if the selected links exceeds a few.

The Firefox add-on Load Tabs Progressively tries to fix the default tab loading behavior of the browser by loading tabs in batches.

It can for instance be configured to load a maximum of three tabs at the same time. Remaining tabs will then be loaded when one of the tabs has been fully loaded. Firefox will load all tabs progressively until they are all loaded.

load tabs progressively

Performance increases as tabs can be loaded faster. This increases both startup time of Firefox but also load times when lots of links are opened at once.

The Firefox extension can also mark unread tabs. This is unfortunately done in a rather irritating way so that most users might prefer to turn that additional feature off.

The options can furthermore be used to change the number of tabs that are loaded simultaneously. Firefox users with regular massive tab loading sessions might want to give Load Tabs Progressively a try to speed up their browser during those times. (via JKWebTalks)

Tile Tabs is a Firefox extension that might provide another option for those computer users. The extension can be used to tile tabs in the web browser so that multiple websites are displayed in tiles on the same screen.

I’m for instance using the tile technique to write the article in the left tile on my blog while the right tile displays the Tile Tabs add-on page at the Mozilla website. That’s very handy and easily doable as the monitor resolution is set to 1920×1200 on the computer.

Windows 7 users might think that this feature is similar to the operating system’s option to display two windows on the left and right side of the screen.

Tile Tabs on the other hand offers further options as it can not only be used to tile tabs vertically but also horizontally.

But Tile Tabs can do more than just divide two tabs horizontally or vertically as there is virtually no limit on how many tabs can be displayed in one tab.

There are two ways to tile tabs. The first option is to right-click any tab to tile all open tabs on the screen. The order that those tabs can be aligned can be either as a grid, horizontally or vertically.

The second option is to right-click anywhere on a displayed website to tile that tab to the left, right, up or down with another tab that can be selected from all the open tabs in the web browser.

The Firefox add-on offers other options detailed below:

A tile can be selected by clicking on the corresponding tab button or by clicking on the tile. A tiled tab is indicated by a dotted blue bar under the corresponding tab button. The currently selected tile is indicated by a solid blue bar under the corresponding tab button and by a blue border around the tile contents.

A tile can be re-sized by dragging the adjacent splitter bars. Splitter bars will snap in position when near to the edge of a tile or another splitter bar.

Double-click on any tile to expand that tile and collapse all the other tiles in that group. Double-click on any splitter to equalize the size of all the tiles in a group.

Select ‘Synchronize Scroll’ on the ‘Tile’ submenu to synchronize horizontal and vertical scrolling within each group of tiles. This allows easy comparison of two or more similar web pages. De-select to turn off synchronized scroll.

Select ‘View Normal Tabs’ on the ‘Tile’ submenu to view the tiled tabs at full size (without losing the tile layout information). This is useful to temporarily view the full contents of the tiled tabs. De-select to revert to the tiled layout.

Tile Tabs is compatible with Firefox 3.0 to Firefox 3.6. It can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

In Firefox 3.6 however only new tabs are opened at the far right of the tabbar while new tabs that are opened from existing tabs, e.g. by middle-clicking a link in an already open tab, are opened next to the tab containing the link.

That feels like inconsistent behavior to some Firefox users. Those who prefer the old way of opening new tabs (all at the right end) can make Firefox 3.6 change that behavior to the default behavior of previous Firefox versions.

The changes are made in the about:config configuration window. Simply enter about:config in the Firefox address bar to open the configuration menu. You might need to get past a warning message if that is the first time you open that menu.

Now filter for the term tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent. The default value of the parameter is true which simply means that related tabs are opened after the current and not at the end. A double-click on the row will change the value to false indicating that related tabs will from then on be opened at the end of the tabbar just like new tabs.

One of the advantages of the Firefox web browser is the vast add-on resource pool that improves, changes, removes or adds features to the web browser.

Tab Utilities is such an add-on for the web browser. It improves the tab handling and management of the web browser immensely with the options that it provdes.

Many of the options are available right after installation of the add-on. This ranges from tab opening and tab closing options over mouse-click functionality to link behavior.

Features include:
1. Open Bookmarks/History/URL/Search in new tabs: left/middle click in new background/foreground tabs, ctrl click in current tab
2. Open new tabs next to current tab
3. Reuse current/last/all blank tabs and auto close redundant blank tabs
4. Focus next unread/last selected/last opened/left tab after closing current tab
5. Highlight unread tabs
6. Ctrl-Tab to navigate tabs in mose recently used order
7. Undo Close Tab toolbarbutton
8. Statusbar buttons for Open all links in new tab and Switch to new tabs immediately
9. Duplicate/Protect/Lock/Faviconize/Hide tab
10. Tab clicking options, including left/middle/right/double/ctrl/alt/shift click on tab/tab bar/new tab button
11. Show session history on tab
12. Open link/history with history
13. Single window mode

Some of the most interesting options is access to the tab history when left-clicking a tab, loading urls from the clipboard by middle-clicking on a tab or defining when tabs should be focused in the web browser. Tab Utilities can be downloaded from the Firefox add-on’s website.

Rights To Close is a Firefox add-on that brings another option to the table. It basically maps the option to close a tab in Firefox to a double right-click. This right-click can be anywhere on the website and tab that should be closed which is a very comfortable way of closing tabs in Firefox especially for users who do not like working with keyboard shortcuts and for those who do not like to move the mouse all the way up to the tabbar to close a tab.

The only options available are the behavior if a double right-click is performed on the last open tab in the browser. The add-on can either close down the browser completely or open a new blank tab for the user.

Rights To Close might interfere with other add-ons that map the right-click. It is for instance not compatible with the Multi Links add-on. The Firefox add-on is available for download at the official Mozilla Firefox website. It is compatible with all Firefox 2 and 3 versions.

The basic idea of App Tabs is to offer Firefox users a way to pin selected web services and websites to the tabbar of the web browser making them available always in the same spot. The idea works perfectly for websites that do not require back and forward navigation like Gmail or Google Docs but also for any other website or service that the user accesses all the time.

App Tabs pins selected tabs to the left side of the tabbar in Firefox. The tabs are minimized so that only the favicon of the website or service is displayed. This saves space in the tabbar and is usually appreciated by most users.

The new version of the App Tabs add-on adds comes with the following features:

• App tabs can be saved across sessions! (default)
• App tabs can be merged when closing a window. (default)
• App tabs can be protected from being closed individually.
• If you have Tabberwocky installed, App Tabs will automatically also lock app tabs that you create. This feature can of course be disabled by going to about:config and setting extensions.apptabs.lock to false.

Tabs can be converted into app tabs by ctrl-clicking them in the Firefox tabbar. App Tabs is currently compatible with all versions of Firefox 3.5x to 3.7x. The download is available at the Firefox add-on’s website.

Update: App Tabs has been pulled. probably because it is now a built-in feature of the soon to be released Firefox 4.

browser.allTabs.previews

Enabling this preview feature in the advanced Firefox configuration will add a new button to the right side of the Firefox tabbar. This button, when pressed, will display an overlay window that contains thumbnail previews of all open tabs in Firefox. A click on any tab thumbnail will make that tab the active one in the web browser.

browser.ctrlTab.previews

Enabling this parameter in the advanced configuration will change the default CTRL-Tab feature in Firefox. If you press CTRL-Tab by default in Firefox the browser will cycle through the open tabs in the web browser.The new feature, when enabled, will display a visual tab switcher that is displaying thumbnail images of the current and the five most recent tabs with an option to quickly flip through them by pressing Ctrl-Tab again. The same preview contains an option to display all open tabs.

The very same configuration changes the default behavior of pressing Ctrl-Tab once. It will now switch back to the last tab that was in focus instead of offering the option to cycle through all tabs in the browser.

Do the following to enable one or both of the new features:

Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar, promise that you will be careful and filter for the term previews. This should bring up several parameters with the two mentioned above in the list.

A double-click on either of the parameters will change the default value false to true. The feature is instantly active and can therefor be tested right away.

Pin Tab is a new experimental Firefox add-on that brings this feature to the Firefox web browser. Yes, there have been some tab managers in the past who also provided that option (like the Faviconize Tab extension), but none looked as promising as the Pin Tab extension.

Tabs can be pinned in Firefox by Ctrl-clicking them in the web browser. This will automatically shrink the tab to the size of the favicon and move it to the left side of the tabbar.

The picture above shows a tabbar with two pinned tabs on the left. A left-click on a pinned tab will open the website as usual. It is possible to change the default hotkey to pin tabs or use the right-click context menu option to do so. It is furthermore possible to pin tabs by dragging unpinned tabs to the pinned tab area with the reverse option possible as well.

The main benefit of pinning tabs up to this point should be obvious: Space. It is possible to place roughly 5-7 pinned tabs in the place of one open tab. Unlike the pinned tab option in Google Chrome the Firefox add-on comes with additional features. The pinned tabs will for instance remain pinned over browsing sessions if Firefox is configured to remember browsing sessions.

Pin Tab is an interesting add-on for the Firefox web browser. It can be useful for Firefox users who regularly work with a set of tabs that they usually have open in Firefox all the time. The Firefox add-on can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox website.