Deja vu all over again: tab previews are back in Firefox 3.6

by Lee Mathews on August 3, 2009 at 09:30 AM

Now that Firefox 3.5 has made it into the mainstream, Mozilla is plugging away at browser.next. In last night's addition to the 3.6 nightly builds, some old-but-new tab features have finally made an appearance in Mozilla's browser.

Originally slated for 3.0, then bumped to 3.5, then bumped again, tab previews are back in Firefox 3.6. To activate the feature, you'll need to jump into your about:config and search for browser.ctrlTab.previews. Double click the entry to set its value to true, and the result is what you see above.

Your last six tabs are displayed in a floating window, with a button below that allows viewing of all open tabs (screenshot after the break).

The control + tab feature has also been given a touch-up. You can now choose to have the hotkey cycle through your tabs as it currently does, or change so that it switches back and forth between your most recently active tabs. It's more elegant than having to open a separate window so you can alt-tab back and forth.

Again, you'll need to open about:config and change a value - browser.ctrlTab.mostRecentlyUsed - and set it to true.

Tags: alpha, browser-tabs, firefox-3.6, opensource, preview, tab-switching, visual