How to resize Firefox tabs for easier browsing

Posted on February 2, 2009 at 5:43 am

Since Firefox lets you open a new tab instead of a new window, it let’s you browse multiple pages at once on a single Firefox window.  The downside is that you can easily be overwhelmed by the many tabs as they easily eat a lot of monitor space just like the taskbar:

image

In my computer I usually limit myself to 5 tabs.  Anything above that and I will go nuts managing them on a 14 inch laptop screen.  I’m sure you have a different threshold.  Whatever the limit maybe, we are here to show you how to handle this problem. 

The solution is called FaviconizeTab which is a Firefox plugin that you can get from Mozilla add-ons page.  

Step 1. Download the plugin and follow the installation procedures

image

Step 2: Restart Firefox to activate the plugin.  You should see the list of extensions installed in your Firefox setup. 

image

Step 3: Click options to open the preferences.  Choose a way to activate Faviconize, in the example below I chose “Double Click”:

image

Make sure to click “OK” to activate the changes.

Step 4: Open a new tab to test the tool.  Double click the tab of the URL you want to Faviconize. Below are before and after screenshots so you can see the output:

Before:

image

After:

image

You can see that the double clicked tabs have their tabs shortened up to almost the size of the URL’s favorite icon.  You can easily bring back the tabs to their original sizes by double clicking them. 

By minimizing the size of the tabs, you can quickly navigate each tabs since it will now eat a less amount of space.  The downside is that you need to be familiar with the URL’s icons for you to benefit from this approach. 

We have a lot of browser tips for you on the coming articles so make sure to subscribe to our RSS feed.  In case you missed them, below are some of the articles we posted about some really cool Firefox plugins:

  1. Firefox personas which will let you switch from one theme to another
  2. FoxyProxy for proxy management
  3. Remove or hide a webpage’s part using RIP

Ben Carigtan shows you how it’s done.

» Filed Under Computer Tips

Related Posts

Comments

2 Responses to “How to resize Firefox tabs for easier browsing”

  1. Damilik said on : February 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm

    I have been looking for something like this. So that I can minimize tabs I don’t need and maximize tabs I do need.


  2. All computer tips said on : February 15th, 2009 at 12:37 am

    and how to bring back the tabs that accidentally closed by its user?
    thx…


Please post your comments/suggestions!