Firefox/Mac trackpad scroll through opened tabs

February 20, 2007 / Filed under: Firefox, Mac, Usability

Firefox 2 introduced a more fluent tab bar, which more effectively manages your open browser tabs.

In older versions of Firefox, each opened tab would adjust it's individual width, based on how many tabs were open. With a lot of tabs open, each individual tab would become painstakingly narrow - so much that it became hard to differentiate each tab. With only a few tabs open, each individual tab is naturally wide and comfortable.

Firefox 2 imposes a minimum width, and if the amount of opened tabs goes beyond comfort, left and right arrows appear.

Screenshot of Firefox tab bar

I have yet to decide if I like this feature, since I can no longer see all opened tabs. Also, the arrows force extra clicks, which is tedious when I just want to jump to another tab.

Luckily, on the newer Mac laptops, the trackpad acts as a scrolling mechanism. In this sense, you can "scroll" through your opened tabs. I found this behavior to be a great time-saver.

Just hover your mouse pointer to the tab bar, and using the trackpad on your Mac, start scrolling left or right.

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Comments/Mentions

# Andy at 2/21/2007 7:35 am cst

Works on Firefox 2 on a PC as well. It looks like there is a property in "about:config" called "browser.tabs.tabMinWidth". If you crank this up to 500 or something, you'll see the little arrow after just having a few tabs open. Looks like there are a lot of new properties to tweak when searching for "tab".

# Matthom at 2/21/2007 9:22 am cst

Cool Andy, thanks..

As a side-note, here's another reason why I don't like this new tabs feature:

You can only re-position tabs around the visible tabs. If any tabs exist beyond the left or right arrows, you can't just drag it to the far right (or left), and have it "auto scroll." You have to click the arrows first, and then drag it.

It needs to "auto sense" that you are trying to drag beyond the visible view.

Woops nevermind. I was wrong. I didn't test it enough, and rushed that point out. It seems to auto-scroll just fine, when re-arranging tab order.