TidyFox, a new add-on for the web browser, changes that by adding two buttons to the Firefox header bar. The first button displays a list of the websites that have been opened recently. That alone would not be that spectacular, but the fact that the listing is sorted by domain names with sub-listings of all pages visited on the domain make it interesting.

A click on the button displays the recently visited domains. Hovering the mouse over a domain name displays the pages that have been visited on that website. It is possible to open the root domain, or any of the pages of the domain that have been visited recently.

firefox recent websites

The second button uses the same layout and design, but displays the most visited domains and pages on those domains in the listing. That’s very helpful to quickly open those sites, or popular pages on those sites in the web browser.

firefox most visited websites

Firefox users with lots of page visits will notice a short lag after clicking one of the buttons, which unfortunately happens every time and not the first time only.

Reducing that lag should be a top priority of the add-on developer. Caching could be a solution for instance. The second annoyance is the lack of filtering in place. First, lots of similar pages of a domain are displayed in the domain listings. Second, there does not seem to be a page limit in the listing, which means that some listings display dozens of pages that need to be scrolled.

Still, Tidy Fox adds two new buttons to Firefox that can be very helpful for many users. The add-on is compatible with Firefox 1.5 to 3.7. (via Firefox Facts)

The Most Visited bookmarks folder is placed in the Firefox bookmark’s toolbar displaying the most visited items that can be found in the Firefox history. The Recently Bookmarked folder contains all the recent bookmarks that have been added to Firefox while the Recent Tags folder does the same for tags that the user added.

All but the Unsorted Bookmarks folder can be deleted easily by right-clicking the entry and selecting delete from the menu. Once they are deleted there is no obvious way to get the folders back.

There is however an easy way to reset the special folders so that they appear again in Firefox 3 after a restart. To do that the user needs to enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and filter for the name browser.places.smartBookmarksVersion in there.

Only that entry should appear now. A right-click on that entry and the selection of Reset will reset the folders and activate them again after a restart of the Firefox browser.