I’ve always had a problem with tabs in FireFox (or any browser for that matter.) I might be working on a couple of projects at once, have one or more documentation sites open which usually have several pages open in different tabs. Finding what I’m looking for can become a bit of a pain, especially when the tabs start scrolling horizontally on me.
I just found this great Addon for FireFox called “Tree Style Tab”. It allows you to organize your tabs in a vertical sidebar on the left or right side of the screen. This is configurable, it will let you have the tabs be on any 4 sides of the web page, but, when the tabs are displayed in a vertical fashion they can be displayed in a tree-like structure. If you are on a website and click a link that opens in a new window, it will open in a tab underneath the tab you are on. The same is true if you CTRL+Click (open in tab) any link.
This is great! Consider this: You search Google for something. The first 5-6 links look promising, but you’re not sure which. If you CTRL+Click on each link, it will open them in a new tab underneath the Google Search results tab. You can then look through each, maybe close a few, maybe close them all and go back to Google to look some more.
What I particularly like about this is that if you get distracted in the middle of your reviewing the results, maybe you click off to another tab, maybe hours go by before you can get back to looking for whatever you’re looking for, all that stuff is still there, organized and neat. You can even collapse the tree so all of the tabs don’t take up so much space.
This feature will be just as handy while reviewing documentation sites. I often times have 3-4 tabs open to various jQuery related docs (often for plugins.) It will be really nice having them all grouped up like that!
You can Tree Style Tab from Mozilla’s FireFox Addons Page here:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
Tree Style Tab was written by Piro, a programmer in Japan. His page for the plugin is translated into English though:
http://piro.sakura.ne.jp/xul/_treestyletab.html.en
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