Tired of Firefox’s new tab page reveling what you are looking at? With the holiday season upon us and with more and more people shopping online, that is reasonable. You can disable this feature though. That way you can keep your browsing history a secret!
Tag Archives | thumbnails
Disable New Tab Page’s Thumbnail Capture
Visual Bookmark Organization
Looking for an alternative way to manage your bookmarks? ViewMarks might be the solution.
This interesting extension for Firefox will give you customizable thumbnail previews for all of your favorite links.
Better Thumbnail Zooming
Want a quicker way to make that thumbnail just a little ‘bit bigger?
The Firefox add-on Thumbnail Zoom will do the work for you, and works with a lot of the popular image hosting websites out there. All you need to do is download it, and then get to zooming!
Quickly Enlarge Facebook Photo Thumbnails
Looking for a quick and easy way to enlarge thumbnails of photos you see on Facebook? Facebook PhotoZoom will do the trick. This simple add-on will bring simple photo magnification to your favorite social network.
Enable the Tab Preview Menu Button in Firefox 3.6
I have one more Firefox 3.6 about:config tip up my sleeve. By toggling one setting, you can go from having a drop down list of tabs to a thumb-nailed view of each tab that is open.
Here is how you too can enable this secret Firefox 3.6 feature.
Google Toolbar Give us Chrome’s Thumbnails
Want to get Chrome’s thumbnail preview page when you open a new tab in Firefox?
Google has ported one of Chrome’s most popular features to Firefox, the personalized new tab screen. The only catch is that you have to use the Google Toolbar to get it. Your new tab page looks exactly like Chrome’s after the install of the Google Toolbar 5 Beta.
When do you get this fantastic new edition? This happens when you launch a new tab( hit Ctrl+T, or you double click on the empty space to the right of your tabs). You can check out all the other features of the Google Toolbar Beta 5 on the official web site:
I stopped using Google Toolbar myself once the search box was added to most browsers. I mean, why do I need two search boxes in one browser window? That is a post for another day though. However if you want to check out this new ported over feature – be sure to pick up the beta off Google’s web site.
Fast Dial – Quick Check Your Favorite Sites
There are a number of add-ons for Firefox that clone Opera’s Speed Dial feature. There is one add-on with a different twist. Most open your tabs in this fashion, but Fast Dial does something different.
This extension will replace your “about:blank” page with a panel of thumbnails of your favorite web sites. To add sites to the page, all you do is click on an empty cell, assign a URL and click OK.
You can also add sites by right-clicking on the bookmark for them and selecting “Add to Fast Dial”. (you can do this on open tabs too!)
Where does this come in handy? Well let us say you are hitting Ctrl+T to open a new window. You are no longer greeted by an empty window. Instead you have a window with your own personal favorites list inside. Fast Dial is a unique bookmarking extension that I think a lot of people will get a lot of use out of.
Move Tabs to the Sidebar
The Tab Sidebar add-on for Firefox does a simple change, but after I can promise you you’ll get a whole new perspective for the way Firefox works. It acts more like a replacement for the tab bar and includes an always visible thumbnail preview of all the tabs you may have loaded up.
Here are some of the other Tab Sidebar features:
- 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
- Displays the security status of tabs
- Automatically refreshes the tab preview whenever the page changes
To activate the extension, just go to View and then Tab Sidebar to see it. On the down side, some have complained that CPU usage goes way up when using this addition. On the good side though, hey – you get pretty thumbnails for all of your tabs! In the “what would I like to see” I would like to see if work flawlessly with the scroll wheel on your mouse.
There is a lot of promise and a lot to already love, so give Tab Sidebar a download either via the Firefox Add-ons site or the official web page for the extension.
Interclue for Firefox
Interclue for Firefox kind of excites me because I think they are trying to do a good job with a browsing idea that really hasn’t been my cup of tea yet, the “thumbnail preview”. One positive is that they say it stays out of your way when you do not need it – which is my argument against other extensions like this. As you can see in the preview, they offer more than just your standard screenshot of the next page too.
Here is how the developers of the extension describe it:
Interclue displays useful information and relevant next actions for almost any link on the web. Clueview tooltips are not like other previews, they show you only the most relevant content straight from the page, rather than relying on small cached snapshots or large scrolling windows.
This could either be a really helpful tool or an annoying clutter feature that drives me batty after 3 minutes of use. I think different people may take different things away from it. if you enjoy the idea of having a sort of “picture in picture” preview with some other handy links give Interclue for Firefox a shot.
Mozilla Addons – Updated Thumbnail Preview
Not sure how long this update has been out there, but Mozilla has done something really neat with their addons web site. Right now, when your looking at an extension, you know you can click on the screen shot to see it a little bigger and by itself – right?
Well now when you click on a thumbnail, and the extension has more than one preview you can browse through them using the right arrow button or the thumbnails underneath.
For an example, try checking out the entry for Flagfox on their web site, and click where it says “See all preview images”. I wonder if this is just something out of the blue – or maybe a update preview to the Mozilla addons site getting ready for Firefox 3?
