You think you know tabs? Video

You think you know tabs? Video Transcript

[ music ] ^M00:00:12

>> Tabbed browsing. It's where browsers have gone. But are you doing it with maximum power? I'm Brian Cooley with an Insider's Secret on how to master tabbed browsing in the Firefox browser. Now Firefox was not the first browser to bring tabbed browsing to the floor, but I think it was the one that really made tabbed browsing popular with the mainstream user. And Firefox 2 brought some great refinements to tabbed browsing, like a close button for each one of the tabs, as well as the ability to stack and scroll then manage the tabs better. A lot of goodness there. But, you can go farther. I'm gonna show you how to use a Firefox extension called Tab Mix Plus, to really super charge your tabbed browsing experience. Let's do it. Now first of all, you have to have Firefox installed of course and we're gonna go get Tab Mix Plus, right here at www.Download.com. There it is and you can see it's a pretty compact download. You'll wanna get that installed on your computer and restart your browser when you're done. Okay, now that I've restarted Firefox, after installing Tab Mix Plus, let's make sure it's there. Open Firefox again, go to tools and there it is. Tab Mix Plus options. Let's open that up and look at some of the major features. There are too many here to cover exhaustively, but I'll show you some of the winners. Now, if you recall earlier versions of Firefox, where you could have multiple rows of tabs open, when you were really intensively opening sites, if you miss that, you can re-establish that with Tab Mix Plus. What you do is go to the display menu here at the top. Now go down to this bottom selection. When tabs don't fit with, in other words you've got more tabs than will fit in one row across the top, now you select the behavior that you want. You can say, multi-row. Hit apply and now go open about 20 or 30 different websites and you'll see you get a nice stacked row of open tabs. Now, in that same panel of Tab Mix Plus, the one called Display, let me show you another tweak that a lot of folks like to have control over. You see where it says close tab button, you can check or uncheck that and that will decide whether or not you have a button on each tab to close that tabbed browsing session. You can also change the position of your tab bar, top or bottom. That's kinda nice. You can set extra space on either side of each tab. A lot of flexibility on how your tabs operate, not to mention where your tabs operate. Okay now check this out. If you're a big fan of sidebar bookmarking and you wanna open a group of sites at once, all in their own tab, that's not difficult. Again, going in the Tab Mix Plus, this time under a different area, under events, right here. I drop down to the section called open tabs from and then I can select bookmarks and apply that. Now I'll get the behavior I'm looking for with opening a group of URL's or links, bookmarks, into their own individual tabs, all automatically. Okay, the last bit of pressed digitation you're gonna blow folks away with is this one. Now we're gonna show you how to open up a tab in it's own new browser window. When you want a separate it out and make it solo. So here's where that setting is. In the Tab Mix Plus options, go to mouse. Under mouse, go to the sub tab mouse clicking. Then go to the tab double click and here where it says on a tab, when you double click on a tab, what does it do. You've got a wide range of choices as you can see, but the one I wanna point you out to is either duplicates the tab in a new window, so it makes a new one in it's own browser window or moves the tab to a new window. I kinda like the elegance to moves that tab to a new window so you break it out and move it to it's own browser and kinda keep it as it's own instance of the browser software. So you are now the tabmeister of all times, thanks to Tab Mix Plus. I hope you've enjoyed this Insider Secrets on really supercharging tabbed browsing in Firefox. I'm Brian Cooley, thanks for watching. ^M00:04:10 [ music ]