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Filed under: Internet, Mozilla

Coming soon to Firefox 3: tab previews

Firefox3 tab preview
While Mozilla may not have officially released Firefox 3 beta yet, that hasn't kept us from drooling over some hot new features in the next generation of the popular web browser. The new places bookmark manager, for one is pretty sweet. And Mozilla Links points out another feature that may or may not make it into the official release: a new tab preview feature that works like Alt+Tab on Windows machines.

With Firefox 2, you can switch between tabs by hitting Ctrl+Tab. You can also see a list of open tabs by hitting a little arrow on the right side of your tab menu bar.

The new extension (which is currently experimental, but which might wind up in the final release of Firefox 3), replaces that little button with a black box. Click on it and thumbnail images of all your open windows will pop up over a black screen. If you hit Ctrl+Tab, you'll get an Alt+Tab style window on the center of your Firefox screen, letting you scroll through your open tabs without actually scrolling through your open tabs.

In the grand scheme of things, the advanced tab switching application might not actually save you any time. But it sure looks pretty.

Filed under: Windows

Vista tip - make your Alt-Tab thumbnail images larger

Alt Tab
Windows Vista's flip 3D is pretty and all, but it's not actually much more useful than the Alt-Tab feature. In fact, since it takes longer to load it might be less useful.

Fortunately Microsoft has also updated the Alt-Tab view in Windows Vista, providing live thumbnails of your open applications. In fact, if you've got a video playing in one window, you can watch a tiny version in the Alt-Tab view (or by using your mouse to scroll over your media player in your taskbar). That's both cool, and useful if you're juggling between a dozen open windows.

But if you've got a high resolution monitor, you may notice that the Alt-Tab view takes up a small chunk of your screen and presents tiny little thumbnails. CyberNet has a little registry hack that will let you resize your Alt-Tab view to take up more screen space and use larger icons. If you feel like mucking around with the registry settings, it looks like you could also tweak a few more display settings.

Featured Time Waster

The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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