tabs

It hasn't been updated since February 2005, but the free Firefox Preloader continues to help users who want faster boot times while maintaining a heavy load of tabs and extensions. Weighing in with an installer at 840kb and using around 30MB of RAM, the program gave me dramatically improved start-up times on a fully loaded Firefox 3.0.7.

Somebody running a clean, unencumbered version of Firefox probably wouldn't find Firefox Preloader all that useful, so I tested it against Firefox with 22 extensions and about 40 open tabs. The extensions ranged from the bulky Cooliris to the … Read more

After testing this sleek, straightforward browser, we were ready to get rid of our current, more popular browser, and make The World Browser our default.

The user interface looks professionally designed, with self-explanatory command buttons at the top of the window. Below that are shortcuts to all of your bookmark categories. The interface can be customized to add or remove extra toolbars, but we liked the clean, uncluttered look of the default settings. Tiny navigational buttons make it easy to move through opened tabs. We especially liked the tab preview option for displaying all of your open tabs on one … Read more

There aren't a lot of Microsoft Outlook competitors out there, but Mozilla's open-source Thunderbird is one of the best. Postbox for Windows and Mac, and built on Thunderbird code the way that Flock is based on Firefox, is a new face on the e-mail field.

Still in beta, Postbox takes desktop e-mail hard toward Web 2.0, with fast links to upload contacts to Facebook and pictures to Picasa. Click on an e-mail, and the preview pane not only shows the text, but extracts all links, images, other attachments, and contacts into a sidebar for easy management. Postbox … Read more

If you find yourself browsing dozens of Web pages at once, this free add-on offers a handy way to manage all those open tabs.

FaviconizeTab is a behind-the-scenes add-on for Firefox 1.5 and newer. It quickly transforms the size of a single tab into nothing larger than the Favicon already displayed on it. Users can simply right-click any open tab, select the FaviconizeTab option, and the tabs shrinks instantaneously. The same action quickly returns the tab to normal size. Although that's the sum total of FaviconizeTab's functionality, the program worked without flaw in our tests.

When Internet … Read more

This handy little add-on falls under the category of tools you never knew you needed, but find extremely useful once you try it. Tab Scope conveniently lets you navigate all of your tabs without having to click back and forth between them.

When you hover your mouse over a tab, Tab Scope displays a small preview window that represents the tab's current Web page. Just like a browser, the preview window contains navigational buttons for moving forward and backward, refreshing the page, zooming in, and stopping the page load. The Options menu gives you control over the window size, … Read more

Good news for Firefox users who have lusted over Chrome and Safari's option that lets you "tear" away tabs from an open window. The latest build of 3.1 offers it as a standard feature--and it works marvelously.

As in Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari browsers you simply pull away a tab from the interface and it turns into its own window. Likewise you can drag it back into an already opened window, just like you'd do to re-order your existing tabs.

While not a ground-breaking feature, tab tearing is a large step … Read more

One of my buddies just tipped me off to a must-have tab management add-on for Firefox. It's called FoxTab, and it's a cross between Mac OS X's Expose, Windows Vista's Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you've got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, this offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one.

To toggle it on you just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also … Read more

This is one of the best Firefox extensions around and makes tabbed browsing even better than it already is. Tab Mix Plus can change the close button on each tab feature, control the rows of tabs when you exceed the width of the browser window, and almost everything else associated with tabs. Use your scrollwheel to browse tabs, or control tab switching via mouse gestures. You can specify where Web pages will open--in the background or the foreground, in a new tab or the current one--based on how they were created: by clicking a link, typing an address, or using … Read more

This simple utility enhances Windows' ALT-Tab functionality by displaying screenshots of open windows along with their icons. TaskSwitchXP Pro's familiar Windows XP-style interface is accessible from the system tray or by using the conventional ALT-Tab hot key. The icons are arranged in a vertical list on the right, while a snapshot of the selected window appears on the left.

TaskSwitchXP Pro is extremely handy, especially with multiple instances of a particular application. The graphic display makes it much easier to choose the right window. You'll find an assortment of settings for customizing the program's appearance, choosing and … Read more