Web Browser Wednesday
I’m one of those people who doesn’t know what they would do if their Web browser didn’t have tabs. The problem is that I am a tabaholic and always seem to have 20+ Tabs open at any one given time. As you can imagine, I am often left with very little room for each tab, andfind myself clicking through them all when I’m looking for something. Well, that’s how it was until I decided to put my tabs on the side of my browser.
All of the monitors that I have on both my desktops and laptops are widescreen, giving me extra screen space in the horizontal direction. Because of this extra space I have started to place things like my Windows Taskbar on the side, and that’s when I thought to put my tabs on the side as well.
It’s actually pretty easy to do…
—Firefox—
There is no option in Firefox to move the tab-bar to the side, so the first place I turned was to the extensions. It took a little bit of work but I was able to find an extension called Vertigo which was recently updated to work with Firefox 2. By default the extension is designed to place the tabs on the left side of the screen while still allowing normal operations, such as the rearranging of tabs:
I also noticed that the extension had a few options, including one to adjust the width of the bar:
Then I saw that the developer commented saying that the problems with TabMixPlus were also fixed, so I decided to try that out as well. One of the cool things that I stumbled across when playing with various tab-bar settings was that changing the tab-bar position to “bottom” in TabMixPlus would position the tab-bar on the right-side of the browser if Vertigo was installed:
I also noticed that TabMixPlus took control of the width, but that could easily be changed in the settings:
Personally, I prefer to have it on the right-side because I keep by bookmarks open in a sidebar on the left-side. It just feels weird if you have two sidebars immediately next to each other.
I also tried having TabMixPlus put close buttons on each of the tabs, but that didn’t work out so well. If having a close button on each tab is an important feature for you then you probably shouldn’t try this out.
—Opera—
Opera is a slightly different story because it already has this feature built-in. All you have to do is right-click on any of your open tabs and click the Customize option. You should now see a screen where you can select the positioning from the Placement drop-down list:
After you click the OK button, the tab-bar should be in its new position:
—Overview—
If you don’t have a widescreen monitor this might not be as beneficial to you since it can take up some valuable screen space. Feel free to checkout our other post on reducing tab clutter if you’re looking for more space-saving techniques.
This is cool, and another feature that Opera has but FF lacks by default!!
I’ve just blogged about how much better Opera is than FF, and how with FF hundreds of plugins have been coded that allow the same functionality – but this could have been included in the core anyway. Might aswell get this functionality right out of the box, instead of using so many plugins.
@Alex good point, but remember Fx was originally promoted as clean/simple, fast and safe browser. It wasn’t until Fx 2 came out last fall did the number of ’standard features’ increase dramatically.
im a tabaholic too. i still remembered the first time i downloaded mozilla, it was the suite version. and it had tabs. i immediately fell in love with it and never turned back
I keep trying to right click on links at work and going nuts because I can’t find ‘Open In New Tab’ that is when I remember we are using Internet Exploiter 6.
I’m not sure if this is something that should be added to Firefox for the same reasons as what Fx Extension Guru mentioned. Firefox has become popular because it lets users choose what features they want by installing extensions, and this is something only a handful of users would want. Of course if your installing 100’s of extensions to make Firefox just like Opera you might as well use Opera.
I hear ya, a browser without tabs is virtually unusable to me now. My productivity drops by at least 90% when I’m forced to use a browser without tabs.
IE6 seems like a sick joke now that I’ve gotten so used to Firefox, IE 7, and Opera. And now I just look back and laugh at how Microsoft tried to cover up the missing tabs functionality by using the MSN toolbar:
[toolbar.msn.com]
Personally I like FF because it is a small and clean browser. I only use 4 extensions so mine is still small and clean. Actually one of those, I really do not use, so I could remove it.
I HAVE to use IE7 sometimes because of certain websites (cough, cough…M$). Other than that it is FF all the way for me.
The Firefox Showcase extension also offers this function. You can choose to show live previews of all open tabs in the sidebar and optionally hide the tab-bar when Showcase is open.
I like the traditional tab bar but sometimes seeing the previews helps find the right site.
I think if we tried to upgrade to IE7, our customer database/billing system wouldn’t work (then again, it doesn’t exactly work all that great in IE6.
This add-on doesn’t work properly for me. Only some tabs show up. I have more open. Any idea why?
[aycu30.webshots.com]
Alright, fixed it. In TMP options, give a big number like 30 for max no. of of rows to display.
That’s what I was going to guess…I saw the arrows next to the tab and figured it was trying to scroll because you didn’t have enough rows specified.
Numbered Tabs add-on works fine with this. It puts numbers next to the first 9 tabs. Pressing ctrl tab number will switch to that tab.
Download: [slashhome.org]