I know I recently wrote how to disable colored tabs in Internet Explorer 8, but some people really like this feature. For those that do but instead would like colored tabs in Mozilla Firefox there's the FabTabs extension.

FabTabs internally takes a screenshot of each webpage viewed in a tab, tries to figure out each webpage's dominant color, and places the colors as the backgrounds of each tab. This way you won't see the same group of colors used a la Internet Explorer 8's Tab Groups, but different colors depending on the sites you browse. You can even tweak the algorithm used in determining tab colors and manually force tab recoloring.

1. Visit the following page from within Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12956

2. Click the "Add to Firefox" button.

3. The "Software Installation" dialog box will eventually appear. Click "Install Now" as soon as the button is enabled.

4. Once the add-on has installed, click the "Restart Firefox" button. Depending on your configuration, Firefox may note that it will try to restart your windows and tabs.

5. Once Firefox has restarted, start opening new tabs and you should see them in different colors.


If you want to tweak the formula used to create the colors, select the "Tools" menu, then "Add-Ons". Click "Extensions", and then click the "Options" button underneath "FabTabs". You can change the tab background color from a gradient to a solid, only color the active tab, adjust the screenshot dimensions used to calculate the colors, and more.

At any time you can right-click on a tab and choose to "Recolor Tab" or "Recolor All Tabs".

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