I recently re-installed Firefox on my computer (I had a bunch of extensions installed that I wasn’t using, so wanted to “clean up” the build) and found some cool settings for Firefox’s Tabbrowser Extensions extension.

If you select the author’s settings when you first install the extension (the settings box comes up after you install the extension and restart the browser), the TabGroup Mode is set to “on.” Here’s a screenshot of the settings if you want to try them out without reinstalling the whole extension:

The Advanced… button opens the focused on window

These settings group tabs together depending on how they are opened, and also color the tabs based on these groups. Here’s an example of how it looks in my browser:

I also have my Tabbrowser Extensions settings set to display tabs on the left.

In the screenshot above, the green tabs at the top are all pages I got to starting from Jon Udell’s blog on Infoworld. I originally went to the upper most green tab, Jon’s blog, and opened three links from this page in new tabs. Notice that, in addition to these three tabs all being green, that these three new tabs were spawned directly below the parent “Jon’s blog tab” and not at the bottom of the tab list.

Oh, I used a hack in Firefox’s userchrome.css file to change the color of the active tab’s background to yellow — that’s why the first tab in the list, Yahoo!, is yellow. It’s handy for keeping track of which tab you are on when you have a bunch of tabs open. Here’s the userchrome.css code I use:

 /* Change Active Tab Color */
tab {background-color: white !important; color:black !important}
tab[selected="false"] {color: black; background-color: white !important;}
tab[selected="true"] {color: blue; background-color: yellow !important;}

Using colors in tabs rocks.