Extension Spotlight: Firefox Tabs

It's time for Extension Spotlight.

The extensions in this segment, you will find, are often going to be Firefox extensions. But there are loads of great extensible programs out there, so please, send any suggestions you have! I'll try and be as varied as I can in the mean time.

Anyway, with the impending release of Firefox 3 (of which we will soon talk about the Awesomebar) comes a necessity for new and compatible extensions to tweak the ever-important Tab bar.

First of all, I must make some comments about Tab Behavior. For whatever reason, Firefox still does some silly things. The trusty Tab Mix Plus always remedied two important aspects:
1. I like tabs opening to the right of my current tab, not at the end of the list.
2. When I close a tab, I want to go to the last selected one, not the one to the immediate left.
While you can still do this with Tab Mix Plus, unfortunately some new mechanics of the tab bar are somewhat crippled. Primarily, I'm talking about what happens when you open "too many" tabs - there's now a nicely animated shrinking, and a horizontal "smooth scroll" when using the mouse wheel when hovered over the tab bar. (And I do love smooth scroll of all sorts!) In any case... TMP makes this stop working. And I kinda like it. So I tracked down two extensions to remedy (1) and (2):
1. "Tabs Open Relative"
2. "FLST - Focus Last Selected Tab" *

Now that that's settled, I came across a not-new, but very cool extension:
Faviconize Tabs. *
I almost always have several tabs permanently open. For me, it's Gmail, my homepage, and often Digg, so instead of having them take up precious tab bar space, this extension turns tabs of your choice into simple favicons. Cool. Easy to manage, aesthetically pleasing - I like it a lot.

As an aside, if your favorite websites have crappy favicons, try this extension: Favicon Picker *


(click for full image)

And what, you may ask, is the deal with the different grayed tabs? Well, another cool extension I stumbled upon is Aging Tabs *, which highlights your most recently used tabs and desaturates those that you haven't been using. It's a great way to keep your tab bar from getting out of hand, and likewise wonderful if you're trying to accomplish something that requires a lot of switching between a few tabs. (Like scheduling for classes, ugh!) Aging Tabs is especially cool because you can customize not only its colors, but the rate and method of aging. I have it set to age "When switching tabs" at the smallest amount possible (25%) to achieve the behavior I just described.

I also happen to like the way it highlights the active tab. I was actually looking for an equivalent of Colorful Tabs or ChromaTabs, neither of which work very well with Firefox 3 - and I found this. And I'm digging it. And you should try it, too.


Finally, I wanted to give a shoutout to Tab Scope, which on hover gives you a popup of the page at hand. Nifty at times, and fun anyway, you can even scroll pages in the preview, or go back/forward/refresh/etc. You can also customize the size of the preview. Cool stuff!

So, ye scurvy tab bastards, get customizing!
And check out Firefox 3 now! And share any cool things you find.

* (You will have to disable compatibility checking or use Nightly Tester Tools for these extensions marked with asterisks, but I've encountered no issues with them. However it is worth noting you'll probably have to register at Mozilla to be able to access extensions for "incompatible" versions of Firefox.)