Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Freeware, Browsers
Thumbstrips adds visual browsing history to your Firefox
It's currently featured in the Digital Pack Rat assortment on Fashion Your Firefox, and for good reason. Thumbstrips' snapshots make locating previously viewed pages much easier. Apart from the thumbnail, the site's domain name and the approximate time it's been since your visit are also displayed.
Now that I've shown my four-year-old son how to click the little overlapping box icon to show and hide it, it's cut down drastically on questions like "Daddy, how to I get my Scooby game back?" A less frustrating browsing experience for my family members is always a welcome change.
My only complaint about Thumbstrips is its limited customization. I want to be able to display the strip on the left or right side of my display: 1280x800 gives plenty of width, but not so much height. Still, it's a definite improvement over a text-only history listing and worth the install.
If you've used thumbstrips, share your thoughts! If you're using something similar, we'd like to hear about that, too!

Many enthusiastic web surfers know that the venerable Internet Archive is the home of the 


How'd I Get Here?
I rely on Firefox's History to keep my most frequently-accessed web sites available at a keypress. I can type any letter into the address bar and immediately choose among my favorite web sites whose URLs start with that letter. That's not the tip; read on. Unfortunately, the History gets polluted sometimes -- somehow a web site I have no interest in visiting frequently will find its way to the top of the list for some letter I use often, which really chafes me. For some reason I've ever been convinced that there's no way to delete individual URLs from the History without just clearing the whole thing. Turns out I was wrong. In Firefox, if you want to delete an individual entry from the History, just highlight it (either in the History sidebar or in the address bar drop-down) and press Shift+Delete. Gone, never to bother you again!
After spending the better part of an hour on 