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Mozilla Firefox - Plugins and Extensions

Preview Tabs as you Hover Over Them

SUMMARY: Hover over tabs in Firefox to view thumbnail previews with the Tab Scope extension.

Have you ever opened a group of tabs inside Mozilla Firefox but forgot what pages you opened?

Instead of clicking on each individual tab to see what webpage is contained therein, consider the "Tab Scope" extension. You can hover over tabs to view webpage thumbnails, or click the "List all tabs" button and hover over a tab name to view its thumbnail. Plus, several configuration options are available including the thumbnail size.

Hovering over a tab in Firefox to view a thumbnail via Tab Scope

1. Visit the following page from within Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4882

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.

Installing the Tab Scope add-on

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, open some tabs, then hover over them to view previews.

You can access Tab Scope's options via Firefox's "Add-ons" dialog box to alter the thumbnail preview sizes, wait time to show a popup, popup alignment, whether or not to always show the page title, and other options.

This tip was written for Mozilla Firefox v3.5.2 and Tab Scope 0.2.2.11 on a Windows Vista machine. Screenshots, instructions, and features for other versions may vary.

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1. Mony (10/30/2009 14:28:16)

I find the add ons based upon tabs are interesting because I often (always) open more than 10 tabs at a time and I think this works all the recent version of windows.