TreeStyle Tabs lets Firefox take advantage of your widescreen

Filed under: Mozilla, Freeware, Browsers

TreeStyle Tabs lets Firefox take advantage of your widescreen

by Lee Mathews Oct 21st 2008

Since I was finally given the green light to install a new widescreen monitor at my office, I'm blessed with vast, barren expanses on either side of the web pages I'm viewing.

Thankfully, while reading my RSS feeds this morning I came across Sizzled Core's writeup of the TreeStyle Tab extension for Firefox. It allows you to move your tabs list to the left or right of the screen (as well as the top or bottom if you choose).

I won't lie. It's a little disorienting at first, and I found myself still mousing to the top of my Firefox window from time to time, but it's definitely a nice change now that I'm used to it. As an added bonus, stretching the tab bar to fill more of the blank space mean seeing more informative - or at least longer - titles than you would with the Liliputian default tabs.

Right-clicking the tabs allows to to expand and collapse all tab trees, and you can, of course, still drag-and-drop your tabs to re-order them.

I prefer the simplicity of TreeStyle, but if you're looking for a more feature-rich solution you may want to try Tabextensions 3. It's got a few more tricks up it's sleeve, like thumbnail previews and performing actions on multiple tabs.

Tags: addons, extensions, firefox, tabs

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Rocketboy said 9:17AM on 10-21-2008

So, Firefox has an add-in for another thing that Opera could aways do?

Steve said 9:17AM on 10-21-2008

Isn't this the same thing everyone is bashing the new iGoogle over?

tigsfan said 9:51AM on 10-21-2008

Hey Lee I was just curious what theme you were using for Firefox in that screen?

Lee Mathews said 10:02AM on 10-21-2008

It's Smoke: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/7024

piyo said 9:58AM on 10-21-2008

Tell me when Opera has _TREE_ style tabs. I don't see a mention of _TREE_ style management in Opera.
http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/tutorials/tabs/
One practical application is when opening multiple links like on Google search result page or auction search result page. Quickly open them using the middle mouse button, scan each one, then close the children tabs by selecting "Close Children".

Rocketboy said 3:48PM on 10-23-2008

Even better, you can get a list of all the links from a page in one sidebar. So then you don't have all of the tabs,err, windows, to close.

And boo hoo, did I say something bad about Firefox? I know, how dare I point out something like that.

piyo said 9:29PM on 10-24-2008

I am reminded of http://xkcd.com/198/
:-)

Zaxour said 10:41AM on 10-21-2008

Instead of this, why not try un-maximizing your window? After using a mac for a while, this is one of the better habits I've developed: not maximizing any window unless absolutely necessary.

Do you really need all that blank space on both sides of the content in your browser? Why not leave it un-maximized so you can see other windows behind it, or your contact list on pidgin, etc.

michael.shi said 8:13PM on 10-21-2008

Exactly!

I was going to say this but you beat me to it.
I has a 22" wide screen for my server2008, I found myself un-maximize my firefox all the time so that there's a narrow portion of right of my desktop showing all the time, where I could find most frequent shortcut.

Eric said 2:10PM on 10-21-2008

Some pages (off the top of my head, Engadget) expand based on your monitor size.

I like having maximised windows - even on my Mac. Unless I need to see two windows at once, I always have Firefox, GarageBand, and Mail as large as possible.

Other apps I don't need that big.

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