Learn How to Make App Tabs in Your Browser

Just a quick tip for this evening.

With Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 6 and also Google Chrome you have the ability to create an “app tab” (in Firefox speak) or a “pinned tab” (in Chrome speak). Basically, these are like sticky tabs that persist between browser sessions (i.e. when you close and reopen them) and reduce the number of clicks compared to using a bunch of bookmark folders.

App Tabs in Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 6

App Tabs in Mozilla Firefox 4.0 Beta 6

Pinned Tabs in Google Chrome

Pinned Tabs in Google Chrome

It’s really quite simple to make an app or pinned tab – simply right click on an existing normal tab and in Firefox click on “Make into App Tab” or in Chrome click on “Pin tab”. The tab will then move to the front of the queue and also collapse to show only its favicon (the little icon that shows up next to the tab title). This is quite handy as you can cram in a whole stack of them in the same space as a few traditional tabs would normally take up (at least five or six of these shrunk tabs compared to one normal tab). Also, you can get rid of any bookmark toolbars you might have if you can satisfy your high usage tab requirements using this approach.

At this time, it doesn’t look like Internet Explorer 9 offers similar functionality but you always have the option of dragging a tab down to the taskbar in Windows 7 and creating site specific shortcuts (some of which will have customised jumplists in the case of Facebook for example).

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