Tab previews are in the works for a long-term edition of Mozilla Firefox.
In existing versions of Firefox, hover your mouse over a non-active tab (i. e. , any tab other than the one you’re currently viewing) to see (after a slight delay) a tooltip containing the name of the web page.
Useful, especially if you have a bunch of tabs open, add multiple from the same site, and you can’t seem to see enough page name in the tab to know which page is where you are.
But in the latest Firefox beta builds Mozilla developers are experimenting with a major enhancement in the form of tab previews.
When this feature is enabled, tab tooltips adopt a new ‘card’ design that shows a large thumbnail preview of each webpage, the website/webpage title, and the page URL:
The Firefox tab shows a preview of the work with all the tabs in the current/active tab, adding pinned tabs (where this feature can be particularly useful given that they only show a favicon).
Since this flag/change is enabled by default in existing Firefox betas, we shouldn’t expect to find tab previews in Firefox 123 when it launches as a solid update later this month.
But the fact that Firefox developers are implementing this feature is encouraging.
Other trendy internet browsers, such as Google Chrome, Vivaldi, and Safari (although this isn’t available on Linux), also show thumbnail previews when users hover over non-active tabs in the browser.
It’s understandable that Firefox is following suit.
That said, some folks find these visually-rich tooltips distracting, so I hope Mozilla choose to include a toggle to disable tab previews in Firefox if — and for now it is still an ‘if’ — it decides to enable them by default in a future release.
To test this experimental feature, you’ll need to have the latest beta edition of Mozilla Firefox.
If you’re Ubuntu, you can install the Firefox beta from Mozilla’s APT repository, download a binary from the Firefox website, or use the Snap Store beta channel.
Open Firefox Beta and:
Once activated, you can use it; You don’t want to restart the browser.
If you don’t need to see thumbnails of Internet pages in new tab maps, you can disable them by converting the browser. tabs. cardPreview. showThumbnails transfer to false.
For the speed/slowness of the tooltip, edit browser. tabs. cardPreview. delayMs. This default price is 1000 (milliseconds), which means that tooltips only appear after hovering over a tab for at least one second.
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