It pains us to say it, but sometimes tabs are a waste of time. We hate when we're on a site, and see a story with an accompanying link that promises to be the epiphany we've been waiting for all our lives. We eagerly click the link, and feverishly switch to the new tab. Our hopes and dreams are tragically dashed to pieces when we find the link is to a parked domain that has nary a thing to do with the subject at hand.

Interclue is a Firefox extension that allows for previewing web pages before you click the link. It gets a little less buzz than the similar Cooliris extension, but we think it's just as worthy. Cooliris doesn't require clicking on the preview icon to pop up a preview window, a simple mouse over will do. It's amazing how often we mouse over the icon, not meaning to, and get the preview.

Interclue gives the option to click on the preview icon, which might give us carpal tunnel in the long run, but is much easier on our psyche than having preview windows seemingly appear at random. From the Interclue preview window, we see the contents of the page in question, as well as some optional vital stats for the site we're viewing (called metaclues). We can bookmark, email, open in tabs, and paste the site link to the clipboard. We can easily resize the preview window and change our settings to not recognize certain links or certain pages.

Interclue 1.5.1.4896 was released January 2nd, and works in Firefox 1.5 and up. Despite its impossible version number, its simple interface and unobtrusive application is a breath of fresh air for those poor souls traumatized by dead end links and madly popping preview windows. We highly recommend it for those wanting link previews who have been less than happy with other applications' execution.