Before

If you have a lot of tabs and/or windows open it can get rather frustrating trying to sort through them easily…especially if you are a “visual type” of person. For our example we opened five tabs…not bad at the moment but think what twenty to thirty tabs could be like all scrunched up in the tab bar. But there is a better to way to quickly sort through them…

After (Using Toolbar Buttons)

As soon as you have installed the extension you should open up the “Customise Toolbar Window” to find the toolbar buttons associated with the extension. As you can see there are six available for you to choose from…each one will provide an easy way to view all of your open tabs and/or windows. There are two that provide a pop-up window, two that open a new tab, and the remaining two are for the sidebar. The “pairs” either focus on the tabs contained in a single window or focus on all windows open at that time.

Since we are focusing on all the tabs contained in a single window for our example, we chose the “Showcase Tab Button”. One quick click and thumbnails of all our open tabs were displayed in a new tab for easy selection. To open a particular page simply click on the appropriate thumbnail and that tab is instantly brought to the front while the “Showcase Tab” will conveniently disappear.

After (Using the Menus)

For those who would prefer to access Firefox Showcase through the menus, there are two “options” available in the “View Menu”. The first is for Sidebar access…

Here you can see the “Showcase Sidebar”…if you select a page from the sidebar it does not automatically disappear.

Note: The option to have the sidebar disappear can be enabled in the options.

And the second is for the “Showcase Tab” or the pop-up “Showcase Window”.

This is the pop-up “Showcase Window”. As with the “Showcase Tab” shown above clicking on a thumbnail brings that tab (or window) to the front and closes the pop-up window. It really is just a matter of choosing the style that best suits your needs.

The nice thing about the Firefox Showcase extension is that you can export/import personalized settings and restore the defaults if things get messed up for some reason.

Conclusion

The Firefox Showcase extension provides a very customizable and visual way to sort through high numbers of tabs and/or windows while you are browsing.

Links

Download the Firefox Showcase extension (Mozilla Add-ons)

Download the Firefox Showcase extension (Extension Homepage)