Geodog

Tabbrowser Extensions: couldn't use Firefox without them

I was surprised to read posts from David Weinberger and Dan Gillmor today asking about functionality they wanted from a Firefox extension. My favorite Firefox extension, Tabbrowser Extensions, does 98%+ of what they want (sorry David, no back massages). I decided that if tech gurus like those didn't know about Tabbrowser Extensions, others might not as well, and it was worth expanding briefly on the comment I left on David's site.

Tabbrowser Extensions allows you to customize how Firefox works as a tabbed browser. Want clicking on a link to open a new tab instead of a new window? Or want clicking on a link that takes you to another site to open a new window, but a link that takes you elsewhere on the same site to open a new tab? Want a little X on every tab? With Tabbrowser extensions, you can customize your browsing experience to have any permutation of tabbed browsing imaginable, and I have.

Tabbrowser Extensions also gives you a little button on the toolbar that you can click to see a list of all open tabs of that instance of Firefox, and you can jump to the tab you want. You can also save the list of tabs, and click on that saved list to bring them back up.

Ever close a tab by mistake? Incredibly usefully, Tabbrowser Extensions has an Undo Closed Tabs button you can put on your toolbar that will drop down a list of your most recent closed tabs. Click on the one you didn't mean to close and it will reload the page.

I wouldn't use FireFox without it. It that makes me a geek, so be it. I will say that I recently installed it on my mother's computer, and she loves Tabbrowser Extensions as well. It does mean that when I use Firefox, I generally have one or two instances of it open, each with 20 or so tabs :-).

I am still on FireFox 0.93, waiting for all my extensions to be updated, and Tabbrowser Extensions works perfectly on 0.93. I don't know what the situation is with 1.0 PR.

P.S. One of the reasons that people may not have heard of Tabbrowser Extensions is that early in its history, the code overwrote some of the Firefox code, which made the Firefox developers unhappy with it. Also, for reasons I don't know, the extension isn't listed on the Mozilla extensions update site. However, the code has been changed, Ben Goodger is no longer unhappy with it, and Ben has stopped recommending that people not use it. The developer of Tabbrowser Extensions, Piro, is very responsive to feedback and updates the extension regularly.

For a brief review of other extensions I find invaluable, see Firefox 0.9x has some great new extensions that make it worth the pain of upgrading.