March 2nd, 2007
I saw a Lifehacker blog post today in my RSS reader on this Firefox extension, took one look at the screenshot, and went “Woooooow, give me some of that“. Aforementioned Firefox extension: Tab Groups extension for Firefox.
As its name suggests, it allows you to group your tabs in, er, groups. Forget the verbiage, just look at the screenshot:
This extension is a godsend for those of us who usually have a bazillion tabs open in Firefox (personally I keep it under a bazillion tabs so all those tabs don’t slow Firefox down - I usually start killing tabs once I hit 30). By allowing you to group your tabs into logical groups, such as one group for work, one for play, and one for your many Gmail accounts, it brings some order to the “tab hell”, which usually happens when you have to scroll or Ctrl/Cmd-Tab through more than 20 tabs to find the tab you want. Some people may use an Expose-style extension to show thumbnails of all their tabs at once, Showcase is one example - those are quite nifty as well though I’ve always found them to be unmanageably slow when there are too many tabs, which kinda defeats the purpose.
Anyway, coming back to Tab Groups extension… This is an extension that’s going to be absolutely necessary for those of us who like having many tabs open at once. For those of you who are less tab-crazy, or even, god forbid, surf in single tab mode, I’d expect you’d be much less excited about Tab Groups.
Tab Groups is pretty much early release software (the author considers it pre-alpha), but it’s very much already usable at this stage. You can create groups, rename them, and start dragging tabs into whichever tab group they belong. There are several features that are missing but almost definitely planned for future releases. For one thing, you can’t move tab groups around, but I’m sure that’ll be baked in soon enough. Also, the tab selector (the dropdown list of tabs thingie on the extreme right of your tab bar) stops working if tab is in another group. Another thing is the Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-T to reopen closed tabs currently reopens tabs in a new tab group. All small inconveniences (that would be soon be removed once Tab Group history gets baked in) for a very nice extension.
Via Lifehacker via CyberNet News.
March 1st, 2007
At yesterday’s WebSG meetup, someone asked me how you can have 2 different user sessions in Firefox, and I was unable to answer as I never had the need for 2 different user sessions (though I imagine it’d be nice for testing certain types of interactive web applications).
Anyway, I found the answer today after some Googling - Lifehacker’s “Manage multiple Firefox profiles” article.
Basically, once you have started Firefox in a profile that you want, you can start another profile by passing the ‘-no-remote’ switch together with the name of the profile you want to start with the ‘-P’ switch:
/path/to/firefox -P profile_name -no-remote
It does mean you need 2 different profiles though, for the 2 different user sessions. Oh well.
February 25th, 2007
It was a few weeks later than planned, but finally (actually, about 3 days ago), we‘re up on the News.com.au Travel section.
No thanks to a CSS bug in IE6, we were delayed by a week. The last thing we expected was a CSS bug hanging IE6 with all the JavaScript we were pushing out, but yeah, well, it was. At least now my conscience is clear - everything works nicely in IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera.
November 16th, 2006
I saw a familiar furry animal on one of the ads near the entrance of City Hall MRT and did a double take when I realized it was actually a firefox! I had no real choice but to snap a grainy photo and post it here.
Well, the ad actually labelled it as a “Red Panda“, but we all know that red pandas are also called firefoxes.
March 19th, 2006
It was not until recently (when I had to actually open Internet Explorer to test some cross-browser stuff) that I realized my workstation and my home PC had a particular problem in Internet Explorer: anything I typed into Internet Explorer opened in Firefox (my default browser). After some Googling, a forum thread over at Neowin.net provided a solution - just delete the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\ {c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6} registry entry.
Long version for Windows Registry newbies (alternatively, you can create a .reg file and run it like someone said in the thread):
- Click our Start button, then “Run…”.
- Type “regedit” into the box that appears and hit Enter. This will bring up the Registry Editor.
- Drill down the tree on the left pane under HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT until you find the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\ {c90250f3-4d7d-4991-9b69-a5c5bc1c2ae6} entry.
- Delete the entry.
- Close the Registry Editor - you’re done.
Anyway, turns out this is a bug caused by having “IE7 Beta1 in an unsupported side-by-side configuration with a version of IE6″, as officially stated in IEBlog.
Painfully, I had to look all over again for the solution back home because I didn’t bookmark the page and it didn’t make sense to run over to the office just for this. Now it’s bookmarked in del.icio.us and blogged so I won’t forget.
Tab Groups for Firefox: best extension since sliced bread… er, tabbed browsing
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