∑/Divergence

Mozilla has integrated several new tab preview features in the recent release of Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 which were initially planned to be integrated into earlier release versions of Firefox 3. Even more problematic than the late implementation of this features is the fact that they are not disabled by default in the web browser. Lets take a closer look at the new tab preview features in Firefox 3.6. It has to be noted that this features are not available in previous versions of the web browser.

browser.allTabs.previews

Enabling this preview feature in the advanced Firefox configuration will add a new button to the right side of the Firefox tabbar. This button, when pressed, will display an overlay window that contains thumbnail previews of all open tabs in Firefox. A click on any tab thumbnail will make that tab the active one in the web browser.

browser.ctrlTab.previews

Enabling this parameter in the advanced configuration will change the default CTRL-Tab feature in Firefox. If you press CTRL-Tab by default in Firefox the browser will cycle through the open tabs in the web browser.The new feature, when enabled, will display a visual tab switcher that is displaying thumbnail images of the current and the five most recent tabs with an option to quickly flip through them by pressing Ctrl-Tab again. The same preview contains an option to display all open tabs.

The very same configuration changes the default behavior of pressing Ctrl-Tab once. It will now switch back to the last tab that was in focus instead of offering the option to cycle through all tabs in the browser.

Do the following to enable one or both of the new features:

Enter about:config in the Firefox address bar, promise that you will be careful and filter for the term previews. This should bring up several parameters with the two mentioned above in the list.

A double-click on either of the parameters will change the default value false to true. The feature is instantly active and can therefor be tested right away.