Yesterday Mozilla officially released version 5 of the Firefox browser. The two new things in the browser that are of note are the do-not-track feature and the ability to view multiple tabs as thumbnails in Windows 7, called tab previews.
For those interested, the do-not-track feature is simply a checkbox in Options > Privacy:
I honestly don’t know if this actually works or not, because it 100% depends on whether certain web sites themselves will even honor it. Nice to have, but depends too much on site administrators to implement the functionality. Time will tell on whether this will be a permanent feature, because if site admins don’t honor it, there’s no reason for it to be there.
Tab previews
In Options on the Tabs tab, the last checkbox is Show tab previews in the Windows taskbar:
When enabled, it’s instantly on and does not require a browser restart. Open several tabs, then hover over the active Firefox icon in the taskbar. This happens:
Tab previews make tabs act basically the same as they do in IE9 as far as the taskbar is concerned. Each tab creates a new ‘stack’, and on hover shows thumbnails of the currently loaded site for each.
What happens if you have a ton of tabs open?
Previews go away and it reverts to text-only menu selections, where if you hover over any the full browser fades into view to show the preview.
I opened up a bunch of blank tabs as an example, and this is what happens:
And yes, you can close tabs direct from this menu if you wish.
Tab previews are a genuinely useful feature especially considering you cannot ALT+TAB to tabs in a single browser instance with Firefox. CTRL+TAB, yes, but only if the Fx browser has focus. When not in focus, you can use your mouse, run over to the taskbar, click the preview you want and jump directly to that tab.
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