If you're gung-ho about upcoming versions of Firefox, you can start testing some of their features via add-ons. Firefox 3.7 is slated to introduce a new look for the progress bar, relocating it to the top of each individual tab but you can enable the feature in current versions of the browser right now, with Tab Progress Bar. This neat little add-on won't cost you much disk space, weighing in at a miniscule 6kb.

A new-look progress bar sounds like frivolous decoration, but it serves a practical purpose, too. If you often load bunches of tabs at once, It's helpful to be able to see the progress of each page you're loading at a glance. With this new design, you won't even have to change tabs to know whether those huge videos are almost done loading. One minor quibble: I've found that Tab Progress Bar best used with a theme that doesn't highlight your current tab in blue, as the progress bar tends to blend in with blue tabs.

Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 will certainly have bigger and better things to offer, but Tab Progress Bar is one small slice of the future that you don't have to wait for.

[via Lifehacker]

One of the slick visual elements of Google's Chrome browser is pin tabs. They're those compact tabs that're only as wide as a favicon, and they save a ton of space in your tab bar. You could point out that Firefox doesn't have this feature, but I'd give you the Firefox fanatic's standard answer: there's an add-on for that! For Chrome-style mini-tabs in Firefox, grab the Pin Tab extension.

Pinning a tab using ctrl-click shrinks it and moves it to the left of your tab bar. A pinned tab is preserved across all sessions, and you can't accidentally upset it using the address bar. If you enter a new URL while a pinned tab is selected, that URL opens in a new tab instead. You can pin tabs by dragging them to the left of the tab bar, and unpin them by dragging them to the right. Pinned tabs save a ton of space, since they're several times smaller than regular ones, so this add-on is ideal for those who have dozens of sites open at once.

[via gHacks]

UPDATE: The developer of this add-on seems to have taken it down for right now.

Tired of accidentally closing important tabs in Firefox? Tabberwocky, a useful tab-manager add-on, lets you protect a tab, open a duplicate tab next to the original, and lots more. Tabberwocky can move the 'close tab' button to either side of a tab, highlight unread tabs, retain a tab's history when you open a link in a new tab -- and that's just the beginning! This tiny 25kb add-on has a list of options about a page long.

Tabberwocky's main competition is the popular Tab Mix Plus add-on, which offers very similar features. What Tab Mix plus has that Tabberwocky still doesn't is the session manager, so you can save and restore sets of tabs and windows, even after a crash. Tab Mix plus has been known to slow down Firefox's performance on some systems though, so Tabberwocky might be a lighter alternative to try if you've been having problems with TMP.

[via ghacks]

Moneyseize is a very straightforward single-screen platformer with charming 8-bit graphics and music. The goal in Moneyseize is to, well, seize all the money.

You're in charge of the 'gentleman', and your job is to jump around in each level and collect all the gold coins. Your gentleman is attempting to build a skyscraper, and needs to collect 1000 coins to complete it. There are critters in most levels, and they also hold coins, and you must also avoid the various obstacles and hazards, like the prototypical spikes.

An interesting twist in the game is that while there are 25 coins available in each level, in many levels it is not possible to reach them all. As you progress through later levels, you can press switches that will occasionally change the layout of previous levels, making once impossible-to-reach areas reachable. Since you control which levels you visit from the map screen, the game takes on a bit of a puzzle flavor to go along with the straight platform style, which feels very reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

While I can't imagine actually completing MoneySeize, my building has already grown far larger than I ever intended it to get, just in testing it for this post. That's usually the sign of a good game.

Tabbed browsing might be the greatest thing since sliced bread. In fact, after having tabs for so long, it's frustrating to try using an older browser that doesn't support them. We still deal with it in our office applications, though. Granted, it's rare to have as many Word documents open as we do webpages, but even 4 or 5 can turn into a mess. OfficeTab helps out by adding tabs to Word, Excel and PowerPoint, so you can save screen real estate and switch between docs more easily.

You can choose to add tabs to some or all of the apps OfficeTab supports, in case you want them in Word, but not in PowerPoint, for example. OfficeTab doesn't take up much space, it just keeps your tabs in a standard-sized toolbar. You can even view your documents side-by-side in the same window, which is handy for comparing drafts. OfficeTab works in Office 2003 and 2007 on Windows XP, Vista or 7. It's made by a Chinese developer, so both Chinese and English versions are available.

[via Slashnow. Thanks, Ben!]

Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.

Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.

So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.

I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.

Mozilla drummed up a fair amount of interest in a future version of the Firefox web browser a few weeks ago by posting a mockup photo showing a handful of new features that could be included in Firefox 3.7. But the Firefox team is looking even further ahead. Yesterday a few images of a Firefox 4.0 mockup hit the Mozilla Wiki.

One image shows a Google Chrome-like tab menu which actually hangs out above the navigation bar. This layout saves space, providing you with more room for the browser window. But it also involves removing the page title bar.

Another concept shows a combination stop/refresh/go button attached to the location bar. When you're typing a URL, you'll see a green arrow button that you can hit to visit the URL in question. While a page is still loading, you'll see a red X button that you can hit to stop the page from loading. And when you're already on a web site, it'll show a refresh arrow.

These are just concepts at the moment, and may or may not eventually make their way into the web browser.

[via CNet]

Ever try closing a series of tabs in Firefox by hitting Ctrl+W over and over until you were down to your last tab? Ever overshoot and accidentally wind up closing the whole browser and then having to wait (im)patiently to reload the browser?

There's a setting tucked away in the recesses of Firefox 3.5's configuration options that will keep the browser running after you close the last tab. Instead of closing, Firefox will simply display a single blank tab.

Here's how it works. Type "about:config" into the location bar (without the quotation marks), and then finding the setting labeled "browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab" (again, without the quotes) and double click that setting to change the value to false. That's it. Now when you close all your browser tabs Firefox will stay open.

[via Lifehacker]

New Tab Jumpstart isn't the name of some geeky new action movie, although that would be kind of cool. It's the latest in the ongoing development of a decent new tab behavior for Firefox. We've covered several attempts at getting this just right, and New Tab Jumpstart is one of the best so far. It seems largely inspired by the speed dial made popular by Opera and now Google Chrome, but that's not a bad thing.

Chrome users will find the layout of Jumpstart very familiar. The majority of the page is taken up by a grid of frequently-visited sites that you can pin permanently or delete. On the right, there's a search box, a list of recent bookmarks, and a list of recently-closed pages. It's a sensible starting point for a new browser session, although it lacks the eye candy of, for example, Safari's start page.

[via Lifehacker]

The people behind the Firefox web browser have been thinking long and hard about the way it handles browser tabs for a few months now. Most of the discussion has centered around how new tabs should behave. Should they show a blank screen? RSS updates? A list of frequently visited pages? But one developer has a novel idea: what if Firefox didn't have any tabs at all?

Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Once upon a time Firefox, Internet Explorer, and all the other browsers didn't have tabs. Life has become much simpler since tabs were invented. But developer Oliver Reichenstein says browser tabs worked well back when we'd only have a few web pages open at a time. Now that it's not uncommon for users to have a dozen or more tabs, it's increasingly difficult to tell what's going on in the browser tab bar or find the tab you're looking for.

Reichenstein created a mockup of a version of Firefox that looks a lot like iTunes. Instead of tabs and bookmarks, you could tag web pages to make it easy to sort or search for pages by category. Each time you click on a link it would take you to the page as you last visited it.

Somehow I doubt we'll see Mozilla take this radical a departure from the common browser tab in time for the launch of Firefox 3.5. But perhaps a no-tab interface could be available as an option in future builds.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

A few months ago Mozilla embarked on a quest to determine a way to make new browser tabs more useful. Right now, when you open a new tab in Firefox you get a blank page. Compare that with Google Chrome, Safari, or Opera, which show you a list of shortcuts to your bookmarked or frequently visited pages.

Today Mozilla's Aza Raskin shared some of the team's conclusions, based on user feedback. Basically, most of the time when you open a new tab it's because you're going to load a web page or conduct a search. The image above shows a screen that tries to help you accomplish these things without getting in your way or requiring much user interaction.

Along the right side of the window you'll find a list of frequently visited web sites. The list is generated automatically, much like the shortcuts that pop up when you launch a new tab in Google Chrome. So there's nothing too new there. But the cooler stuff takes place on the left side of the screen.

When you open a new tab to start a search, there's a decent chance that you've highlighted and copied some text from another tab. So if you've already copied some text to your clipboard, you should be able to conduct a search in the new tab with a single click. Ultimately this action would be tied to your default search engine. Likewise, if you've selected URL, you'll be able to open it in a new tab with a single click.

You can take this new tab feature for a spin by installing the latest development build of Firefox 3.1 and then installing the New Tab proptype plugin.

Safari 4 marks a dramatic shift in UI design for Apple's browser. In the Mac version, the big news is the Chrome-like "tabs on top" layout, and the equally Chrome-like Top Sites feature, but some smaller things have changed too. A new autocomplete feature has been added to the URL bar, and Google Suggest has been added to the search bar. Worst of all, in my admittedly-finicky opinion, That blue bar tracking page load progress in the URL bar is gone.

If this is all too much for you to take at once, and you want the faster rendering and improved standards-compliance without all of the UI upheaval, you might want to have a look at this list of hidden preferences compiled by Caius Durling. Using the Terminal, you can change everything I mentioned above back to the way it was in Safari 3. Want tabs on the bottom again? You got it. And long live the load bar!

[via Daring Fireball]

TabCloser is a Firefox add-on that lets you close all tabs that share a domain name. For example, if you've been searching for something and find you have 6 Google search tabs open, you can close them all with a single click. Or rather, a right click on one of the tabs and then a click on the "close all... tabs" option and then a third click to make sure you really do want to close those 6 tabs. So umm, 3 clicks. Still, if you've got more than 5 or 6 tabs open that you want to close at once, TabCloser might come in handy.

The plugin isn't quite perfect, as it won't notice slight variations on a domain. For instance, if you want to close docs.google.com and www.google.com at the same time TabCloser can't help you.

[via Lifehacker]

Mozilla has added a tab tearing feature to Firefox 3.1 beta, which can best be explained by saying, "watch the video above." But in a nutshell, what tab tearing lets you do is drag and drop tabs, not just within your browser window, but outside of it as well. For example, you can click and drag a tab outside of your Firefox window and it will open a new browser instance. Or you can grab a tab from one browser window into another browser instance.

Now before you say anything, yes, I know that the Opera web browser has been able to do this for ages, and Google Chrome has supported similar behavior since it was launched. But that doesn't make mean it's not nice to see the feature come to Firefox. It takes more than innovation to make a good web browser. You also have to be willing to recognize good ideas where you find them and be willing to implement them in your product.

[via Mozilla Links]

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.