Page Snooze For Chrome, Hide Inactive Tabs

If you are like me, you have some tabs open in your web browser of choice that you do not use regularly. For me it is most often program website or service tabs that I want to write about, but cannot at that point in time. It happens that I keep those websites open in tabs for a week or even longer periods, which does not make that much sense from a usability perspective. An alternative would be to bookmark the website, but that would mean that I would have to remember that I bookmarked it.

Page Snooze for the Google Chrome web browser adds another option to the Internet browser. The extension hides inactive tabs for a certain amount of time on a special page, before it pushes them again to the tabbar of the browser.

Chrome users have two options to work with the extension after installation. They can first and foremost right-click on any page to select the new Page Snooze option in the context menu, or click on the extension’s address bar icon instead.

The context menu displays different inactivity periods, from 5 seconds to up to two weeks. The tab is automatically removed from the tabbar once a selection has been made.

The address bar icon on the other hand will always hide a tab for one week. The tab is automatically added to the tabbar again after the selected time period.

The icon furthermore indicates the number of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser. A right-click and the selection of options displays the list of tabs that are currently hidden in the browser.

Each entry displays the website’s favicon, page title and the date and time it will be moved to the tabbar again.

Google Chrome users who would like to try Page Snooze can install it from the official Chrome Web Store. It could prove useful to Chrome users who know that they do not need to access specific tabs for a specific amount of time.

Display Open Tab Count in Firefox

It is sometimes the little things that can make a big difference in day to day activities on a computer. The open tabs count of Firefox has gone up significantly on my computer system in recent times as I’m currently going through all 20k tags here on Ghacks to consolidate them. Firefox by default only displays a certain number of tabs in the visible area of the interface. The remaining tabs are hidden by default and can be displayed with the help of the back and forward buttons in the tab bar of the browser.

One of the things that I find handy to have as a consequence is the number of all open tabs in a particular window of Firefox.

No modern web browser, as far as I know, displays the open tab count in the interface if the number of open tabs exceeds the visible space of the tab bar.

One of the great things of the Firefox browser is that if you are missing a feature, it is likely that someone else has already created an add-on for it.

The above screenshot shows two different tab counting add-ons at work.

Open Tab Count displays the number of open tabs of the active Firefox window and the number of total tabs that are open in all windows in the Firefox status bar. The add-on has not been updated since 2009 but it still works perfectly under the latest versions of the browser.

Tab Counter on the other hand displays the tab count at the end of the tab bar. It only displays the count of the active window and not the total count like Open Tab Count does.

It does however come with options to change the displays’ appearance in the browser. This includes changing the font, color or size of the displayed number.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: firefox add-ons, tabs

Close Tabs Efficiently In Firefox

Sometimes it is little things that can make a big difference. When it comes to closing tabs in the Firefox web browser, users have options to close the tab with a click on the x icon that is either displayed on the right of the tab or at the end of the tabbar. They can alternatively right-click on the tab and select Close Tab from the context menu, or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-w to close the active tab.

Double Click Close Tab is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that adds additional tab closing options to the browser. A double-click on a site in the tabbar closes that tab automatically in the browser. While that’s more convenient than using the right-click context menu it is not the most efficient option that the extension provides.

Closing tabs by moving the mouse to the tabbar to either double-click or click on the x icon is inefficient because of that initial mouse movement. The keyboard shortcut works directly but can only close the active tab.

Double Click Close Tab adds two additional tab closing options to Firefox. Users can alternatively triple left-click anywhere on the page to close the active tab. This may interfere with some actions in the browser, for instance double-clicking on text to highlight it. If you click three times instead of two, which can happen, you’d inadvertently close the current website instead.

The options of the add-on provide preferences to change the default behavior. Both the default tab clicking and on page clicking behavior can be altered there. Alternatives are a single middle-click, double right-clicks or triple right-clicks.

It is furthermore possible to disable one of the tab closing options completely, and to change the triple click time (that is the time in which three clicks need to be registered).

Double Click Close Tab can be downloaded and installed directly at the Mozilla add-on repository.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: Firefox, firefox add-ons, firefox tabs, tabs

Tab Position Customizer For Google Chrome

Tabbed web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Internet Explorer have specific orders in which tabs are opened and closed. Developers have to configure orders for opening blank pages and links as well as activation rules when users close tabs. The default behavior of most browsers opens blank tabs on the rightmost side of the tabbar, links to the right of the active tab and activate the last used tab after closing a tab.

Some users may prefer a different order of things. Someone with one hundred or more open tabs would not necessarily want a blank tab opened at the rightmost location of the tabbar as it is easy to lose the orientation this way.

The Google Chrome extension Tab Position Customizer empowers the user to select the tab order. In particular it is possible to select the tab opening position, the new tab behavior and the behavior after closing a tab in the Google browser.

Here are the available options:

• Tab Opening Position: Always first, Always last, Right of the current tab, Left of the current tab, Chrome default
• Activate Tab After Tab Closing: First tab, Last tab, Right tab, Left tab, In activated order, Chrome default
• New Tab: Activated (foreground), Not activated (background), Chrome default

As you can see, there are lots of options to configure the tab opening and closing behavior in Google Chrome.

Chrome users need to open the extension’s options via the Wrench > Tools > Extensions > Options menu first to make the changes to the tab behavior in Chrome. The changes made on the configuration screen are active immediately which is handy for testing purposes.

The Tab Position Customizer extension empowers Chrome users to pick the tab opening and closing behavior that they want. You may have noticed that the extension has another option under Miscellaneous which configures Chrome to open pop-up windows always as new tabs in the same browser window.

Chrome users can download the extension from the official Google Chrome Web Store.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: chrome tabs, google chrome, google chrome extensions, tabs

TooManyTabs For Chrome Improves Tab Management

If you have a lot of tabs open in the Chrome web browser, you will notice at one point that you cannot see the favicons (the website specific icons) anymore in the browser’s tab bar. That’s a problem as it is no longer possible to identify the websites that are open in Google Chrome.

Take a look at the following screenshot to see what I mean. The limit varies depending on the size of the Chrome window and the resolution of the computer monitor.

If you look at the Firefox web browser, you will notice that its developers have added a minimum tab width in the browser to avoid this issue.

Back to the Chrome browser. The only viable options for Chrome browser users are to either limit the tabs that they open at the same time in the browser or to install a tab management extension that provides alternate means of identifying and working with tabs in the browser.

The TooManyTabs extension for Google Chrome is one of the most popular Chrome extensions. Here is a video showcasing the tab management extension’s primary features.

The extension adds a single icon to the Chrome address bar. You can click on that icon at any time to display an overlay of all open tabs in the browser.

Each tab is displayed with its page title and a thumbnail screenshot of the actual web page. Sorting options are available at the top to sort by name, web address or creation time. If you have many tabs open you may also find the search function helpful as you can use it to narrow down the tab listing if you want to find specific websites.

A left-click on a thumbnail or title switches directly to the tab so that it becomes the active tab in the browser.

The right sidebar menu displays a list of suspended and recently closed tabs which can be restored with a single click of the mouse. It is furthermore possible to suspend tabs with a click on the arrow icon in the interface. The benefit here is that suspended tabs do not use memory or cpu cycles.

TooManyTabs is a handy Google Chrome extension for power users who often have dozens if not hundreds of open tabs in the browser. The extension can be installed directly from the official Chrome web store.

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© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: chrome tabs, google chrome, google chrome extensions, tabbed-browsing, tabs