Tab search
01.04.08 - 02:06pm
I love tabs. I’m one of those people who spends a week with the same browser window open, just creating tabs every time I look at something new. In my mind, it means I can always find what I was looking at a couple hours ago of even a couple days ago. Maybe with the awesome bar I should consider changing my behavior, but old habits are hard to break regardless.
But, this leeds to one of my biggest pet peeves of browsing the internet; searching though 149 tabs (really, that was the count when I checked ten minutes ago) trying to find the one I want. I’ve complained about it a lot, mostly to my roommate who I doubt was listening.
The good news is I finally decided to get off my duff (or on it if you want to take things literally) and do something about it. Its a simple extension that adds a search box to the “All tabs” drop down in firefox. That’s the drop down that lists all the tabs you have open when you click the little down arrow on the extreme right of your tab bar. This is my first foray into the world of extension making, so use with caution….
http://people.mozilla.org/~blassey/tabsearch.xpi
As a side note, I began thinking about how we manage tabs in Firefox while I was doing this. It seems to me that there is a lot more we can do here. First off, wouldn’t it be great to get some sense of the history of a tab when looking at the all tabs drop down? I know I’ve frequently lost track of a tab I was keeping open to look at an API because I had clicked on a link and the title had changed. Just a thought….
Did you know if this existing extension: http://www.semicomplete.com/projects/firefox-tabsearch/
It uses a keyboard shortcut instead of plugging in the tab menu.
nice. addresses https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343846
However, find across multiple windows would be even better.
I wonder what changes might be required to have it show which tabs have changed form information – https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=370318
Personally, I want tab search in the awesomebar.
Sylvain, I didn’t know about that one. I looked on addons.mozilla.org and didn’t find anything.
josh, I thought about that, but was’t sure how the UI should look. One thing I did think of was having some indication in the awesomebar that a particular URL was already open in a different tab or was in the history of an open tab.
Do you know Showcase? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1810
It shows thumbnails of all the open tabs (either in the current window, or in all windows), supports searching and you can even do “bulk” operations (like move several tabs from one window to another, or delete a group of windows).
Besides displaying a (clickable?) indicator in the awesomebar, you could hijack Alt-Enter (that usually means open in a new tab) to open the existing tab.
Do you use tippy by the way? It displays the recently closed tabs inside the tab menu on top-right.
Which gives me an idea: also include recently-closed tabs in your search.
I meant this Tippy.
Hey Brad – this is a great little extension. There are a few bugs in it which, if addressed, might make it even better:
– the search field should start with keyboard focus, and with the last entered text selected so that a new search term can easily be entered or the existing term can be deleted
– it doesn’t maintain keyboard focus, which is a problem if I search for something and then try to down arrow (common, as my hands are already on the keyboard)
– it seems to be redrawing a lot, which is slowing things down
Cool work, though! Very helpful.
Mike,
Thanks for the feedback. I’ve posted and update to it to include your first suggestion, which does make it much more usable.
Unfortunately, the menu normally consumes all key events, which prevents the user from entering text into the textbox. The only way I could find around that was to set ignorekeys to true. The side effect of that is to disable keyboard navigation within the menu. I tried to reimplement the keyboard navigation with a keypress listener, but it seems that calling menuitem.focus() has no effect. Do you know of any other potential solutions?
And finally, I think the slowness is due to repeated string operations (toLowerCase() and match()). I was able to eliminate on call to toLowerCase per iteration though, which should speed things up a bit.
blassey,
My firefox-tabsearch extension (as mentioned by Sylvain) might have appeared on addons.mozilla.org, except I gave up after finding myself drowning in red tape trying to get the extension added.
I tend to find google is a much better resource for finding firefox extensions, since 100% of addons.mozilla.org is visible through google and you get the bonus of finding extensions not hosted on that site (keyconfig, for example).