Technology All The Way

Firefox Version 3.6 introduces a new way of handling tabs : visual tab switching. It was originally planned for version 3.0 and then again in 3.5, but could not make it to the final release of both these versions.

If you are a traditional user however and love the existing tab switching features of Firefox, you need not worry because these features are disabeld by default. you press Ctrl + Tab to get previews of the current along with the five most recently used tabs, plus an option to show all tabs’ thumbnails.

The all tabs preview also includes a search bar to look for keywords among tab titles and tab close buttons.

Also there is a new behavior for single Ctrl + Tab: in previous versions you would move to next tab in the tab bar, but now you switch to the previously used tab. I have no idea what is going to be the response to this new behaviour, but it not to worry because even this is disabled by default.

But for those who are a bit more experimental than others, you would like to enable tab preview and play around with it until you get fascinated by it or irritated by it. Well, will leave it up to you.

To enable this feature in Firefox 3.6,

Type the following line into your address bar:

about:config

To enable tab preview, set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true

For the new behavior, set browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed to true.

So, play with it and let us hear what you have to say about it.