Plug it in, Plug it in...
February 13, 2011 12:23 PM Subscribe
Do these Firefox addons exist? 1) something to allow you to manually control the width of tabs and 2) something to show the title of a destination page when you mouseover a hyperlink?
I've tried searching but the terms are vague enough that I've had no luck - or that no one's programmed them yet.
I would love the following functionality:
1) Say you have several Firefox pages open. A few you know you want open but you won't be "viewing" for a while, like say old research or a music player site. I'd like to be able to manually shrink that tab width to allow more width for other tab names.
2) When I see a link, typically I'll hover over it and look at the bottom of the browser window. It's great when the URL is descriptive but very often it's just gibberish. It would be great to have the functionality that also displayed the contents of the title tag of the page down there - which would of course require "accessing" that page to grab the text...
Do either of these exist in any form as addons, or is there even a chance that they exist native and I just don't know how to implement them?
I've tried searching but the terms are vague enough that I've had no luck - or that no one's programmed them yet.
I would love the following functionality:
1) Say you have several Firefox pages open. A few you know you want open but you won't be "viewing" for a while, like say old research or a music player site. I'd like to be able to manually shrink that tab width to allow more width for other tab names.
2) When I see a link, typically I'll hover over it and look at the bottom of the browser window. It's great when the URL is descriptive but very often it's just gibberish. It would be great to have the functionality that also displayed the contents of the title tag of the page down there - which would of course require "accessing" that page to grab the text...
Do either of these exist in any form as addons, or is there even a chance that they exist native and I just don't know how to implement them?
Response by poster: kindall that is perfect for #1 - consider it solved! Thank you!
posted by carlh at 12:39 PM on February 13, 2011
posted by carlh at 12:39 PM on February 13, 2011
#2 would be tricky to get right. It would, as you suggest, have to fetch a whole bunch of extra pages in the background, and doing something like mousing through the drop-down menu of a site with lots of sub-pages would be super-expensive. I'd be surprised if anyone has attempted it. That said, the Firefox extension API is sufficiently flexible that it *could* be done if someone wanted to.
posted by andrewpendleton at 12:40 PM on February 13, 2011
posted by andrewpendleton at 12:40 PM on February 13, 2011
Nah, there's no reason to preload that stuff, you can do it when the user hovers over the link for more than X ms. This would be a snap to do in greasemonkey and I'd be surprised if no one has done it before.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:54 PM on February 13, 2011
posted by Rhomboid at 12:54 PM on February 13, 2011
The best way to do #2 would be to run a back-end service that stories titles for URLs, and refreshes perhaps once every 24 hours. The Firefox extension could be designed to fall back to getting the TITLE directly if the back-end is down.
posted by kindall at 5:53 PM on February 13, 2011
posted by kindall at 5:53 PM on February 13, 2011
#2 is typically done via a service, such as snap.com, which seems to be fairly widely reviled, but you might see if snap also makes a client-side plugin.
posted by FlyingMonkey at 7:11 PM on February 13, 2011
posted by FlyingMonkey at 7:11 PM on February 13, 2011
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by kindall at 12:31 PM on February 13, 2011