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Firefox App Tabs Add-On

Martin Brinkmann — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:16:48 +0000

Remember Pin Tabs? The Firefox add-on that we reviewed recently was mysteriously deleted from the Firefox add-on repository over at the Mozilla Firefox website. No one knew why it was deleted and it was not clear at that point in time if the developer would make it available again. The wait is now over with the release of the App Tabs add-on. App Tabs is basically an advanced version of Pin Tabs. The name now reflects the feature of the same name that the Firefox developer plan to include into Firefox 4.

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.

Pin Tabs In Firefox

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 09:54:56 +0000

The Google Chrome browser provides access to a feature to pin tabs in the web browser by default. Pinned tabs will be moved to the left side of the tabbar where their tab will be changed to a smaller icon that is showing only the favicon of the website in question. The benefit of this approach is that the tabs take less space in the tabbar while they can still be accessed normally by clicking on them.

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.