Every Firefox user spends a lot of time dealing with tabs. Thus, improving the tabs directly adds to the browsing experience. You can make them better, faster, beautiful and lot less ovewhelming. So here you go, 7 powerful addons to improve your tabbed browsing.
(1) Vertigo – This awesome extension moves your tab bar to the left side of the browser window and stacks tabs vertically. Highly recommended for people with 20 and above inch screens. You can add a splitter to resize the tab bar to any width you want.
(2) ColorfulTabs – Colors tabs into different colors and makes it easier to distinguish and navigate between multiple tabs. Simple yet very useful. Alternatively you may consider numbering the tabs.
(3) Tab Scope – Quickly preview tab contents by hoovering your mouse cursor over tab. Preview window shows a mini version of the page and a bunch of navigation buttons (Back/Forward/Reload/Stop). Extremely convenient. Although, I wouldn’t recommend using together with Vertigo. Both of them are great addons, but they just don’t go well together. (Note: Tab Scope doesn’t work on Mac OS X.)
Highlights include:
- Real-time preview of tab contents.
- Scroll pages using a mouse wheel.
- Click links or buttons directly in preview.
(4) Tab Mix Plus – Extremely useful extension that adds lots new features to Firefox’s tab browsing capabilities. Some of the better features include undo closed tabs/windows, line tabs in multiple rows, show tabs at the bottom and crash recovery. (Needs some settings adjustments when used together with above mentioned Vertigo.)
(5) Faviconize Tab – This extension adds a “FaviconizeTab” option to the tab context menu. When it is clicked, the width of the tab becomes small up to the size of the favicon (tiny logo icon). When clicked again, the tab window is back to normal.
(6) PermaTabs – This can turn tabs of your choice into permanent tabs. Permanent tabs don’t have close option so can’t be closed accidentaly. Even if you close you tabs accidentally they will reapper in the next Firefox startup. Tabs can be set to (and removed from) permanent mode via right click menu. (Again, may not work on Mac OS X.)
(7) FishEyeTabs – As the number of open tabs increases tabs get smaller and harder to distinguish. Enter Fisheye. It allows user to zoom tab labels by moving the mouse cursor over them.
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I think there is an important extension that you missed – Tab Groups (not sure it’s listed in the extension list on mozilla’s site) – it allows you to create groups of tabs.
You can get it here – paranoid-androids.com/tabgroups/
Thanks, will check it out.
Can you clarify “Needs some settings adjustments when used together with above mentioned Vertigo”? What settings need to be tweaked?
Bascially, some of the default Vertigo settings conflict with certain configurations of Tab Mix Plus. You can check what those conflicting settings are and how to avoid them by going to ‘Tools->Addons->Vertigo->Options’
Faviconize tabs, just what I am looking for! This one will probably be useful if you are opening tabs of your favorite websites. Going to try it a.s.a.p.
Dear.. The tips listed in this blog are cool.. and thanks for this article on extensions of MFF.
I use both Tab Mix Plus and Tab Scope. Without these little gems, I’d be lost in my Firefox browsing hell.
Aibek – Did you really have 220 tabs to close? Wow, you’re a browsing juggernaut!
Not really, I usually try not to go over 100. As about the image, i just wanted to add some ‘WOW’ factor. ;-).
I am going to have to second and third tabgroups from paranoid-androids.com/tabgroups/
You can set up groups of tabs, so you can keep your opened coding tabs in one group, your open email tabs in another, tutorials in another group, etc… They’re tabs within tabs. They have changed my life as much as tabbed browsing itself did. You don’t need anything on this list if you use tabgroups.
Ok, these are great and PermaTabs is just awesome. I’m going to try it right away. I always accidentally close my GMail Tab and then I wait for a long time for it to load.
I think PermaTabs will solve this thing.
You forgot Chromatabs — It’s like colorful tabs but colors the tabs based on site.
That’s a good one!!
Sounds cool.
Why would you have so many tabs open??
Yeah 220 is probably too much. But even if you have about 20-40 tabs open, some of the above extension can make them less overwheling.
I would like to mention Session Manager.
Quite shocked it did not make it on this list, but it is a handy thing to have.
This could be useful for anyone looking for additional extensions to make Firefox great:
Tech In Demand >> Firefox Is Great, But These Extensions Will Make It Extraordinary.
Keep rockin’ the Fox!
Great tips!
Opera fanboy here! Anyways, the add ons mentioned here good, I appreciate the author’s effort to look into all of the add-ons that Firefox users should download to make tabbed browsing a more happy and manageable experience. One other alternative would be to use opera instead!
The option of duplicating tabs is there in Opera as well as locking(i.e, that can be closed) them, already built-in, no extensions. You can also customize opera so that the tabs are always in view, and not in one single line, by selecting the option “wrap tabs to multiple lines”…again, no add on downloads, this is already built-in….
Also the ability to save ur sessions so the same tabs show up again in the same sequence as you had left them when you had closed the browser the last time, was first implemented in opera.
The reason why im mentioning all this is because, i think that if you are working with a lot of tabs, then i really do think there is nothing better than Opera. Just try it!
Thanks for the tip. But as saying goes: “once you have tried Firefox you never go back”.
:-)
So much trouble for even finding out whats out there! Why not just use Opera and make life easy..
*locking(i.e, that cannot be closed)
Multi-line tab bars, Left/right hand side bar, Icon only tabs and the preview on hover are standard Opera options. The fisheye tabs are a pretty nifty idea, though.
Fuck firefox, use Opera.
I don’t use Firefox. Safari ftw.
No way!
any method of controlling/limiting how many open tabs/windows firefox can have?
good article BTW, thanks!
I am pretty sure you can’t set this in preference/settings. Nonetheless, it’s quite possible there are some extensions that allow that.
useful stuff. thank you an ciao from romania.
Article very useful, thank You!
tab mix plus and colorful tabs are a great combo for me, especially being able to run tabs in multiple rows if necessary. fisheyetabs seems like it would work great with these two. thanks for the tips. great site by the way!
You forgot Pagestyle2tab, which brings the look of a page (its bg-color or bg-image) to the tab:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1523
Much better than chromatabs that just calculates a hash from the url, which could make the blue mythwebs tab orange instead of blue!!
Screenshot:
http://www.commentcamarche.net/faq/images/Deb5sjf6I3UV3HHY.png
Another option for grouping tabs is Linkwad. I use it regularly.
linkwad.com
Treestyletabs (http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en) is something similar to vertigo (can align them vertically), but also has the added feature of showing tabs in a collapsable file-tree like fashion, if they are sub-tabs (i.e. opened with “open link in new tab”). Great for goole, wikipedia and other “recursive” prone sessions. Also great in combination with tabmix plus.
Awesome, justwhat I needed. Thanks
What I would REALLY like, now that I have Vertigo installed, is to be able to auto-hide the tabs so I don’t always see them (creates more screen-space). So normally they would be hidden but when I move the mouse over to their location, they would suddenly appear again. I have searched high and low for such an extension but I can’t find anything. Can anyone help?
OK, in a previous comment here (which hasn’t been published yet), I asked if there was an auto-hide extension for the tabs. Well I have just found one – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1337 – and it works with Vertigo! :-)
TabMixPlus will do everything the Opera fanbois are talking about. I don’t know what their idiotic aversion to firefox extensions is, but since it lets people include the functionality THEY need and avoid the bloat of functionality THEY don’t – I’d say it wins out over having it jammed into opera by default.
How about Firefox showcase?
When I added new add-ons it may cause in disable another add-ons
Tab Mix Plus is my option :) Easy-to-use + user-friendly interface + intuitiv options => perfect ingredients.
I was able to do everything here except #5 in opera without going through the trouble of finding extensions. Though I don’t find Find Faviconize Tab useful since opera never hides any of my open tabs.
Nice. I frequently have over 30 tabs open and end up closing many accidentally. Tab mix plus should solve it.
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I have been using tab mix plus. I am interested to see the list.
hi, im used to using opera, but i switched to firefox, the only thing im missing is the way opera handles the tab width, unlike opera, firefox creates scrollable tabs on the tab bar, are there any ways to replicate this same feature of opera to firefox? i dont like multiline tabs, i also tweak the tabminwidth = 0. thanks
because opera devs know what they’re doing. they made a slim browsers but loaded with features, yet it’s still the most efficient browser in terms of memory usage and speed with hundreds of tabs open. FF will break or slow down with 20 tabs. having to use addons just makes FF even slower.
I am sure you forgot to mention Search Tab. Its really really AWESOME!!! https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10164