One Cool Firefox Extension: Viamatic foXpose

Firefox is one heck of a nice web browser, but Firefox with a few key extensions blows plain old Firefox out of the water. If you're not familiar with Firefox extensions, they're add-ons to the browser that increase the functionality. They can be anything from toolbars for blogging, to shorcuts for commonly used web resources like TinyURL.

But today, I'd like to talk about an extension I added the other day that's particularly cool: Viamatic foXpose. This extension lets you view all of your open tabs as thumbnails within your browser window with the click of a mouse. After installing the extension, just click on the little window pane in your status bar to view all of your tabs at once like this:

Very cool, but also quite useful. The presentation potential of displaying four side by side by side by side websites seems quite powerful. Not as powerful as having four projectors displaying the four sites simultaneously, but cool nonetheless. It's certainly been a time saver for me when I find myself with way too many open tabs.

Have you tried this extension? If so, what applications have you found it useful for?

Contest: Can you name the nine web sites I was viewing using Viamatic foXpose? Take your best guess in the comments below. If you have an idea for a prize, add that to the comments as well.

Reveal seems very similar, but flashier, and perhaps more powerful (it includes a page magnifier and history browser).

Good call, Charles. I haven't had a chance to try Reveal yet, but have been tipped off to it from some friends who really like it. I just installed it, but have around 80 tabs open right now, so need to work through a few things before I can restart FireFox to give it a try.

While foXpose is pretty cool, I wanted to mention that the way Opera does it might be even better. I talk about it here: The problem with tab thumbnails.

Firefox Showcase is lot, lot, lot better. It comes with many more options, actions on thumbnails, magnifying lense and previews tabs on many windows simultaneously if needed.

Lawrence, thanks for pointing out the significant differences between how Opera and Viamatic Foxpose handle thumbnails. My use of thumbnails to date has been limited to presentations where I wanted to display four sites simultaneously. Foxpose worked fine for this.

Given enough screen resolution, I could see how Opera's renderings could be usable in their thumbnail state.

Charles, I've had a chance to try Reveal. It's pretty slick extension, but not as useful as Viamatic Foxpose for presentation purposes. At least, I prefer Foxpose for presentaions.

Scrolling through tabs works well, but I've found myself relying on Favicons displayed on tabs, together with blasting through clicks of Ctrl-T rather than using Reveal even after familiarizing myself with Reveal.

Berto, what applications are you using Showcase to solve? Presentations? Navigation? Other?

Ed Kohler, I use Showcase for navigation. Sometimes, having several firefox windows with multiple tabs can make you feel lost, Showcase is the solution, just press F12 solved!

Ed,
To tell you the truth, I haven't used Reveal much. I recently had a problem where my Firfox was crashing a couple of times a day (Thank God for SessionSaver!), so I disabled all of my optional extensions until I could find the problem.

I've now re-enabled it, but I still don't use it much. It has a nice Zoom tool, and can show you a tab's history, but the big feature that's still missing is Window mode (i.e. showing tabs in other windows.) Apparently Showcase can do that, so I'm going to try that one next.

In fact, my message is most likely an offtopic but I just want to share with you about my latest experience with FireFox extensions.
Recently one of my friends recommended me an extension named Hyperwords that totally changes the hypertext principle ?��Ǩ�� no more pre-defined link, any word or phrase can be the link. I?��Ǩ�Ѣve downloaded it from hyperwords.net and installed on my home PC. Great extension! I?��Ǩ�Ѣve already removed 3 other extensions because Hyperword do the same things and much more! I think it will be very useful for almost everybody. It makes searching, blogging, bookmarking, emailing document fragments, translation from / to different languagues much faster than you could do it before. Worth to try. Really!

That is an interesting extension. I've been trying it for a day now and plan to review it once I'm a bit more familiar with it. Thanks Alex.

Comments

1. Posted by: BlogContestSite.com on January 26, 2006 3:30 AM:

Woah! I thought I was aware of all the extensions until I came across you, O' Avangelist :)
Thanks for writing it up.

regards,
jane

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