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Friday 27 May 2011

Tab Groups and App Tabs in Firefox 4

What are Tab Groups? | How to | Firefox Help
If you work with a lot of tabs open at a time, this new feature in Firefox 4 can be quite useful.

Tab Groups win1

Click the link above to find out how to use tab groups.

Tab groups are a way to organize tabs. The feature itself is good, but, to make it more convenient, here is an extension that creates a drop-down menu from beside the tab group button so you don't have to open tab groups to name the groups, switch between the groups and other handy things.
Note: if the TabGroupsMenu drop down menu arrow is not showing on the Tab Groups icon on your toolbar, open Add Ons Manager, go to TabGroupsMenu, click More, and then check off ON, instead of Default. Fixed.
TabGroups Menu



Also, very useful - App Tabs
This is meant for web applications you have open, but, you can use it for any tabs you have open all the time. Right-click on the tab and choose Pin as App Tab. The tab will be pinned to the far left, with just the icon showing on the tab. You can do this to more than one tab. When you close the browser and open it again later, your app tabs will be there still. If you switch groups, these app tabs stay at the left side of the tab bar, no matter what tab group you are looking at.
If you want to put the tab back as a regular tab, right-click on the tab and choose Unpin Tab.
More details about App Tabs here.

Wednesday 18 May 2011

Make old extensions work in Firefox 4

If you want to upgrade to Firefox 4, and you use some extensions (add-ons) that you can't live without, make sure you install the latest version of Mr Tech Toolkit. Right-click this link and save the xpi file to your computer. Then open your add-ons manager in FF4 and click on the little cog wheel in the top right and choose to install from a file.

To make it so you can use non-compatible extensions: in the Add Ons manager, click on the Options for Mr Tech Toolkit, Miscellaneous tab, XPI Install Options, UN-check Enable Addons Compatibility Check, and make sure to check Allow web sites to install software (if you want to be able to install extensions from different web sites).

Note: sometimes using old non-compatible extensions can make things buggy, so, use at your own risk.

For more tips on customizing the Firefox 4 layout, see:
http://thortweak.blogspot.com/2011/03/firefox-4-new-features-explained-in.html