Top 10 Ways Best Ways to Manage Firefox Tabs

The ability to use tabs for web browsing was one of the key reasons why I switched over from Internet Explorer 6 to Firefox all those years ago.

Now that IE7 has come along and has incorporated tabs in their own browser as well, does it make Firefox any less appealing? Not with amount of development which has taken place with the tabs function. Here are some prime examples:

1. Color tabs to make them more distinct

The ‘Chromatabs‘ Firefox extension tints browser tabs with a color specific to the website loaded. This helps you identify tab contents based on a distinct visual cue. It can pick a random color automatically (based on the site’s hostname), or it can pick a color based on the site’s tab icon.

2. Group tabs automatically

With the ‘Separate Tabs‘ extension, tabs can be grouped automatically by host URL making the arrangement of tabs much more logical.

3. Preview all tabs at once

Showcase provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.

4. Preview tabs as you mouse over

While the ‘Showcase’ extension described above is useful, Tab Scope provides a much more subtle approach to the situation, displaying tab previews only when the mouse is moved over the tab. Don’t be fooled though, it even allows interaction navigation within that preview itself.

5. Share your tabs to a friend via email

The ‘Send Tab URLs’ extension adds a File menu command to the main browser window; when choosing this command, a new email message is automatically created, containing a list of URLs from all browser tabs in the current window.

6. Enhance your tabbing options with Tab Mix Plus

‘Tab Mix Plus‘ enhances Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. It includes such features as duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, plus much more. It also includes a full-featured session manager with crash recovery that can save and restore combinations of opened tabs and windows.

7. Save space to view more tabs in a single screen

This extension adds a new ‘FaviconizeTab’ option to the context menu of the tab. When it is clicked, The width of the tab becomes small up to the size of favicon. It returns to the former size when ‘FaviconizeTab’ is clicked again.

8. Count the number of tabs you have open

‘Tab Counter‘ is a simple extension that counts the number of open tabs per window and displays the count in the toolbar. Mainly for fun or you need an indication of how much system resources you are clogging up by having that many tabs open at once.

9. Identify unused tabs

If you have too many tabs open and need help identifying the tabs which you are probably no longer using, the ‘Aging Tabs‘ extension makes unused tabs fade with age. This highlights potential tabs which may be just adding to clutter.

10. Control Tabs With Your Keyboard

Firefox makes mouse-less browsing a breeze with these simple shortcuts:

• Ctrl T will open a new tab
• Ctrl shift T will undo closed tab
• Ctrl Page Up and Ctrl Page Down will scroll through your tabs
• Ctrl Number will bring you instantly to a certain tab. eg. If you hit Ctrl and ?3? you will go to the third tab
• Ctrl D will bookmark the current tab
• Ctrl Shift D will bookmark all the tabs in the window

Bonus Tip #1: You can move Firefox browser tabs from one window to another by dragging and dropping it.

Bonus Tip #2: Disable tab scrolling : Although it does make tabs slightly easier to read on occasion, scrolling through tabs is a hassle. The How-To-Geek blog goes through two useful ways to work around this scrolling feature.

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