How in the Tech

Put Those Firefox Tabs in the Sidebar

By Adam Myers ⋅ February 10, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox

Tabbed browsing really caught on a few years ago with their inclusion in the Firefox browser. While Opera, and perhaps others, did it first – it wasn’t until Firefox featured the functionality that it truly changed the way users browsed the Internet. Along with IE 7, Firefox features tabs across the top of the browsing window, just below the address bar. From a user interface perspective, the location seems logical enough to me. However, there are times that all power users come across – when they have a dozen or so tabs open at once, the display tab begins to shrink, limiting the amount of text area necessary to describe each page. Eventually, you are left with just the favicon of the website. I can’t say I’ve ever gotten to that point, but it is quite possible nonetheless. You may have seen what happens in Windows with you have too many windows in the taskbar – they cascade into one application window that represents multiple instances. Firefox has no such functionality unfortunately – not that it really fits the web browsing paradigm.

Tab Sidebar is a Firefox extension that addresses the above problem and at the same time, tries to bring some usefulness to the Sidebar area. Simply, tab sidebar moves the tabbed windows display from the top area of Firefox and puts it in the Sidebar area down the lefthand side of the window. By stacking tabs down the screen, rather than across, it’s easy to see why you can support many more tabs without losing the navigability.

While the relocation of the tabs is the main feature of the extension, it is not the only feature. Arguably, the feature that may just cause you to install the add-on is the visual thumbnail of each tab that can be displayed down the sidebar, instead of just the webpage title. Think about how you identify open tabs merely by the favicon, now you the same can be down with a full photo. Navigation overlays that allow you to close or reload the tab as well as move forward and backwards through the tabs browsing history are also provided. Now I can really dig that!