Anyone who does a lot of work online has come across this problem. The problem of managing the several tabs we have open. Mozilla has made Firefox 4 beta version available. It’s first build was nothing much to speak about except it was very fast. Now with the latest updated version of Firefox 4 beta there are two new feature which simply blew my mind away.
Features of Firefox 4 Panorama
- First download Firefox 4 beta version. The latest version has Panorama feature.
- Panorama is situated discreetly where all the tabs are located to the extreme right. Simply click on it will give you an option similar to the image shown above.
- Just rearrange your tabs you have open into different groups. Smaller groups can be the unimportant ones while large ones can be important sites you like to visit.
- Click on the tab and you are taken to it. This is different form bookmarks as if you close the browser the sites are saved in Panorama. If you close the tabs it is not saved.
New App Tab feature
- With the new Firefox 4 update another new feature is enabled. This one allowed me to create App Tabs.
- Right click on any tab and create App Tab. (Image to right)
- The tab is saved as a small icon which always open when you load up the browser the next time. Something similar to Pin Tab feature of Chrome browser.
- I think App Tabs will make it a lot more easy to look up some pages which we do not look up too often but do watch regularly. Like a Twitter page or a blog you are following.
Download Latest Firefox 4
Download the Latest Firefox 4 by visiting their landing page for Beta version. If you have already an earlier version of Firefox 4 available, update it from accession Help and Check for Updates on the browser itself.
Video Demo of Panorama feature
Here is a video which explains Panorama Tab feature briefly.
So do you think Firefox 4 will be the browser to beat? I certainly do think so. Do drop in your comments with your views.
8 Comments
Awesome , if thats true , will solve a lot of my problems.
Yup will surely solve a lot of problems. It a very intuitive solution I think. It is true by the way. Ive used it myself.
I’m not a “big icons” person, but a “detailed list” or “list” person, so I don’t actually like it. Just having a drop-down tab list will do it for me. I’d like them to actually self-sort alphabetically, that would be interesting. I’d like to actually disable the tab bar, as I’ve been doing with opera for eras. I guess that there was a extension for that on FF, but I haven’t used for a while, and I don’t even se FF that much, so it does not even worth it.
As for the ability to organize them into groups, that’s actually the best part, even though it would only be more markedly an improvement if one could save “sub sessions” based on these tab groupings, otherwise it’s something implicit on google chrome drag-and-dropping of tabs between windows, only differing that we use different browser windows for tab groups, rather than tab containers within the same browser window. Which is not a meaningful disadvantage, I think.
Besides that, even regarding this feature of saving sub-sessions (which I don’t know it will have, I didn’t even paid much attention to the video), there is an interesting extension for google chrome that sort of takes care of saving custom groups of tabs, rather than whole-sessions (“fresh start” extension, you can unmark the tabs you don’t want to save).
All in all, I’m unimpressed.
The point is FF 4 is quite impressive even in beta version and many features which just make it different. The big question re: Chrome is will be be as fast. I still feel speed and simple interface gives Chrome an advantage.
“Tab sugar” extension for google chrome also does that thing that FF4 will do natively, just found that.
No word… More than useful.
Mozilla shouild have released panorama as add-on instead of integrating it deeply into Firefox,panorama may be over burden for Firefox despite slow in its performane.
As the momemnt never had problems on Firefox with Panorama ofcourse the final build will have to be be tested. 🙂