I just tried out a new extension and the purpose of it is to auto-hide my Firefox Tab Bar. After all, an entire toolbar takes up a good chunk of space and every little bit of room matters to a power user.
I read about this extension over at Mozilla Links who installed what looks like the latest stable version available on the Mozilla extensions site. However, I read through the description a little bit and saw a thing saying “Version 1.0 is coming soon” and then they said that testers are welcomed for pre-release versions. Seeing that I’m a big fan of unstable software (almost to the point that it is an addiction) I jumped over to the forum where the latest unstable version was posted.
Judging from the screenshot that Mozilla Links posted and the one I’ve posted below, I would say the latest pre-release version has a lot of great new features:
The “Show pin button” option is actually quite nifty. It will add a little button at the end of the Tab Bar so that you can “pin” the Tab Bar to keep it open. A screenshot of the pin button can be seen to the right, but yours will look a little different since I’m not using the default Firefox theme. You can also use Ctrl+F11 to toggle the Tab Bar on or off.
At first I thought that I would want the Tab Bar to popup real quick when a new tab opens up (which is an optional setting), but it is quite nice having it nicely tucked away. There are several settings like this that you’ll just have to play with until you get everything how you want it.
I haven’t been using the extension for too long today, but I have the pre-release version installed on Firefox 3 nightlies. It seems to do pretty well, but every now and then it will look like it closes a tab even though it still shows up in the drop-down menu next to the pin button. I’m hoping this is only related to Firefox 3 and later on I hope to try it out on Firefox 2 to see if there are any issues.
You can never have too much screen space but considering how often I click on tabs I think this would just get in the way of my workflow. It’s also nice to know which tabs are open at all times. Just my $0.02
Ryan, you may better serve your readers if you had avoided the ‘rush to publish’ until you had at least tried it out on the current release of Firefox 2.? It does not install on this version.
I have tried it on Firefox 2 and it works perfectly. All of the issues that I was having on Firefox 3 are no longer a problem. It must be conflicting with another one of your extensions.
how to install this .xpi files? in ff…i dwnloaded bt novice in this ;pls tell me hw will i add this 1.02 ver extension to hide tabbar; ihv the old version
You can install an XPI file in several different ways. You should just be able to click on it, but if that doesn’t work you should be able to save it to your computer. After saving it, just drag it into the Firefox browser.