Firefox is great because of how easy it is to use the tabs and the extensibility that the browser has. The Firefox Showcase extension brings both of those great things together to give you a visual overview of all of your tabs. It has a whole slew of features such as:
- Multiple view modes: single window, tab, or sidebar (pictured below).
- Find bar to filter thumbnails.
- Easily select multiple thumbnails with Shift-Click or Ctrl-Click.
- Customizable zooming when hovering over a thumbnail (pictured above).
- A great configuration panel.
- And Much More!
I like being able to view all of the thumbnails in the sidebar without the need of opening another tab which is what other similar extensions do. The latest version that was just released yesterday has several improvements as well as Firefox 2 Beta 2 compatibility.
Here is a screenshot of the sidebar thumbnails:
These preview extensions like Showcase are fine to play with for the first minutes but depending on what your doing they can be useless really. I spend a fair time at a couple forums (moderating at one) so it it useless for forums as every preview tab can seem the same.
SeaMonkey 1.1 I think (I forget at moment)(same branch as Fx 2.0) will basically have the “Tab Preview”extension (one of the first of these extensions) you can get for Firefox built in SeaMonkey, thankfully not going to happen on Firefox. [ted.mielczarek.org]
That’s what people here seem to believe too
[forums.mozillazine.org]
I’m also of the opinions that, whilst cool, these extensions aren’t really needed. I can have alot of tabs open, but I almost always know what they’re there for – though an option to tile them all on one screen could be useful sometimes.
Actually, hold that, what I would really like is the ability to view tabs side by side or one on top of another – just as if they were explorer (or any other) windows. That could be handy.
Ya know, I remember looking for that feature when Firefox first came out but I was disappointed to hear that it is impossible for it to do that. It is all dependent on how whether the software makes use of the [en.wikipedia.org] which Opera currently does.
I’m not sure, however, if it is something that the Firefox developers can add or if the way they designed the browser makes it completely impossible in the future.