As part of upgrading to Firefox 1.5, I ended up downloading and reinstalling all of my Firefox extensions. I’m glad that I did, because the new version of “Tabbrowser Extension”:1 (the _best_ tab option extension… something that should be built into Firefox) has been substantially upgraded.

One of the biggest improvements to Tabbrowser is the addition of a “Tree Mode” for displaying tabs. Here’s a view of what it looks like:

View of tabs in tree mode
(Note tabs are displayed vertically, not the default Firefox horizontal)

Notice how some of the tabs are indented? An indent signifies that the tab is a daughter tab — that is, it is a page that was opened in a _new tab_ from a link on the parent page. If you open a link in a new tab from a daughter page, the new page is indented twice and so on (the default maximum number of indents is three, but you can change this if you like).

This visual display really helps you keep track of your tabs and their origins. Great when you’ve got dozens of tabs open at once. Note that I’ve modified my @userchrome.css@ file to change the background color of the active tab to yellow. I discuss this further in “this”:2 post.

To setup your tabs to display in tree mode, select “Tree Mode” from Tabbrowser’s options category. This will display this option set:

Options page for tab modes

Tabbrowser Extension is one of the most powerful (and complicated) extensions for Firefox. To get a feel for all of its options, I recommend playing around with it for a half hour or so. You’ll really be surprised at the things that you can do with it.

[2(Zoinger on userchrome.css mods)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/archives/2005/07/09/firefox-extension-tabbrowser-extensions-using-the-default-settings/

[1(Tabbrowser Extension homepage)]http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/tabextensions/index.html.en

Here’s a list of my current installed Firefox extensions. The one you can’t read is Tabbrowser Extensions. See my “Firefox page”:1 for more details on the extensions.

I hope these all work with Firefox 1.5.

[1(Zoingers Firefox Page)]http://www.zoinger.com/words/firefox-customization/

Firefox 1.5 is out. Go get “it”:1. That is all.

[1(Get Firefox)]http://www.getfirefox.com

“ViewSourceWith”:2 is a Firefox extension that lets you use an external application to view the source of a page instead of the built-in source viewer in Firefox (e.g., in a new tab or window). Not much to say about this extension, since it’s pretty simple in concept. However, I find it very handy and have added it to my “must have” list of Firefox extensions.

I found out about this extensions from Rawlinson’s “_Useful Firefox Plugins_”:2 post.

[1(Rawlinson's post on useful Firefox Extensions)]http://rawlinson.us/blog/?p=297
[2(ViewSourceWith page at Mozilla.org)]https://addons.update.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=394