Sidebar Tabs in Firefox

Anyone who has used tabbed browsing can tell you, once you try it you never want to go back. It just makes life a little more simple. Is there a better way of displaying these tabs though? What if you had all the tabs (with thumbnailed pictures) in your sidebar? Well, that is what Tab Sidebar gives to Firefox users.

So what is this Firefox extension all about? Here is what the author has to say about it:

The tab sidebar extension, if you haven’t heard of it already, provides a sidebar in the browser that can act as a replacement to the main tab bar, with extras. The most obvious extra is that each tab includes a preview of the web page that is continually updated, but you also get navigation buttons for each tab.

Since Tab Sidebar provides a replacement for the main tab bar, when the sidebar is visible, Firefox’s main tab bar will be hidden. If you still wish to use the main tab bar then you can show it again from the Tab Sidebar options.

Here are just some of the many features Tab Sidebar has to offer: Provides navigation options for each tab including history, stop and reload; Allows you to move tabs around with drag and drop; You can drop links, local files and bookmarks anywhere you like in the tab list; Displays the security status of tabs; Automatically refreshes the tab preview whenever the page changes; Lets you hide the main tab bar when the sidebar is open; Bidirectional support making the sidebar work correctly in right-to-left languages; Works well with other tab-related extensions allowing you to use their context menu additions from the sidebar; and much more.

So does this make the browsing experience better or worse? I’ll let you be the judge of that. One thing I can promise you though is it is something different. The Tab Sidebar 1.0 extension is for Firefox versions 1.4.0 through 1.6. Want to give it a shot? You can download it here.