I noticed that my tabsearch extension wasn't working properly after installing Firefox 3.0b5. A quick read of this document helped me figure out what was wrong. I also wasn't specifying the right content location in my chrome.manifest, which somehow worked fine in firefox 2 despite not being correct. Maybe the previous extension release was a custom built one that didn't use the make system I have now, either way, it's all fixed.

Head on over to the firefox tabsearch project page and download it.

Download: tabsearch-20080430.xpi

Additionally, I've noticed that Firefox 3.0b5 doesn't seem to render this site correctly. Seems like it's ignoring my CSS of "pre { overflow: auto; }" which makes pre tags scroll if they become too wide. I'm willing to accept that I may be doing something incorrect (that has historically worked fine) - I'd much rather have the site render as intended. I'll look into it later.

The goal of this project is to allow me to edit any parameter in the url bar quickly, rather than having to scroll slowly and inaccurately across the single line that is the urlbar. This is extremely necessary when you're dealing with long urls.

My work environment has changed drastically as I become more dependent on Firefox to feed me information from the web. As such, I often have more and more tabs open as the day progresses. Closing a tab is annoying, becuase in 15 minutes I'll probably need that page again. Since I don't close tabs often, I end up with a huge tab list when the only thing I can see in the tab itself is the favicon.

Obviously, searching for a tab is extremely difficult when all you have for identification is horizontal location and a tiny icon. I had previously resorted to a Monte Carlo-style method of finding tabs, which is just a fancy term for "keep clicking random tabs until you find the right one." Again, this has the obvious side effect of wasting time and annoying me.

I set out yesterday to write a Firefox extension to solve this issue. I've got a prototype working pretty well, but a friend recently pointed me at Reveal. Reveal is a Firefox extension that lets me search titles and urls of open tabs for a page I'd like to view. It can search the page text, but I imagine that it is quite cpu intensive, so I don't bother. I installed it, and while I don't care for the thumbnails, the searching is fast and useful. However, I have doubts of it's speed when running on slower machines (this particular desktop is 3.4gHz).

With about 15-20 tabs open, it seems to perform pretty well. I am uncertain as to how well it scales. Being able to turn thumbnailing off entirely might be an option worth trying. For now, Reveal solves the problem well enough.

I have lots of ideas about how to search pages quickly without having to search the entire text content - like only looking at "important" tags such as the H1-H6 series, etc. I haven't needed page text searching yet, though, so I'll wait on spending time on that particular problem.