Announcing "All Tabs Helper"

[Kevin Jones]

"All Tabs Helper enhances the All Tabs menu (right of tabs bar) to perform actions such as closing, loading, unloading, moving single/multiple tabs at once. Search tab titles or content, visited tabs history, find duplicate tabs, all right from All Tabs menu. More..."

All Tabs Helper: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo ... 99dfe79d6d

User's Guide: http://tech.kevinallasso.org/all_tabs_h ... anual.html

Support questions can be asked here in this thread.

Bug reports are appreciated and can be made here as well. If reporting a bug, please give as much detail as possible and individual steps taken to manifest the bug.

Constructive feedback is appreciated and can also be posted here.

Allasso Travesser

[rbc]

Very nice addon, thanks.

Some suggestions:

* It would be great if keyboard support could be extended.
E g shortcuts to open /close tab list, switch between ATH header tabs, move through the list and select a page.

Actually, if 'typing auto search' option disabled, it's possible to move through the tab list with ↑ ↓ arrow buttons, selection is visible, but I couldn't select a tab with Enter.
With 'typing auto search' enabled, behavior looks different: arrow buttons don't have effect, PgUp/PgDn move the tablist and the current page simultaneously. (Win7)

* The long enough tab list 'twitches' when mouse is moved across the scroll buttons 'areas'. Is it possible to change this by disabling/delaying autoscrolling.

* Option to increase tab list column width, or showing tab tooltips maybe (some page titles are long).

[Kevin Jones]

Thank you for your input, rbc. I'll reply to your message in a little bit.

[Kevin Jones]

All Tabs helper has now been fully reviewed.

Version 0.0.9 is now available.

[Kevin Jones]

Very nice addon, thanks.

Some suggestions:

* It would be great if keyboard support could be extended.
E g shortcuts to open /close tab list, switch between ATH header tabs, move through the list and select a page.

Actually, if 'typing auto search' option disabled, it's possible to move through the tab list with ↑ ↓ arrow buttons, selection is visible, but I couldn't select a tab with Enter.
With 'typing auto search' enabled, behavior looks different: arrow buttons don't have effect, PgUp/PgDn move the tablist and the current page simultaneously. (Win7)

* The long enough tab list 'twitches' when mouse is moved across the scroll buttons 'areas'. Is it possible to change this by disabling/delaying autoscrolling.

* Option to increase tab list column width, or showing tab tooltips maybe (some page titles are long).

All your suggestions are worth considering.

1) Yes, I agree. I was going to have a keybinding to open/close the menu, but forgot. I tend to be more mouse oriented, so I don't think about those things without some prompting.

2) Again, some more focus on keyboard access. I'll work on that; at the very least the behaviour should be consistent. I can't believe I didn't notice that the browser page scrolled as well :-/ That was an easy fix, be in the next upgrade.

3) I don't experience the "twitching" you are talking about on my Mac or on Windows XP. Maybe I'll get a chance to see what you're talking about if I get to another computer.

4) You can adjust the popup width in Preferences. It will go almost 600px. I can't imagine practically speaking anyone would need to see any more title than that. As far as tooltips go, I would have to think about that one. Personally they are annoying to me. Though I can see the practicality of them for the person (like me) who keeps the popup at the minimum width, but personally, I've never needed anything more than what I can see there. That might get into the area of trying to please everyone and creating a Frankenstein :->

[Kevin Jones]

In focusing on getting my extension through full review, I had just wanted to get something up here for user communication.

Now that the dust has settled, I would like to thank:

ake79
PatrickJDempsey
squeaky
morat
Philip Chee
max1million
Loud Noise

...and many more fellows on Mozillazine Extension forum who have been so very helpful.

But most especially, lithopsian, who always had something to offer if there was no one else to help

[rbc]

3) I don't experience the "twitching" you are talking about on my Mac or on Windows XP. Maybe I'll get a chance to see what you're talking about if I get to another computer.

Sorry, I actually meant "instant autoscrolling". Moving the mouse across up-scroll button area often activates scrolling for a short while, with list moving a bit, like twitching. Anyway this looks to me now as Firefox behaviour with long lists, not the addon's.

As far as tooltips go, I would have to think about that one. Personally they are annoying to me. Though I can see the practicality of them for the person (like me) who keeps the popup at the minimum width, but personally, I've never needed anything more than what I can see there. That might get into the area of trying to please everyone and creating a Frankenstein :->

It's your call of course, but tooltips as an option is hardly a way to creating Frankenstein. They are quite handy sometimes, e.g. tabs with several Google results on the same subject, which look the same in a narrow list.
Btw, on my computer all tabs with Google search results are shown as 'dup', regardless of the queries and tab titles. Is this intentional? Interestingly, I see no such effect with Bing.

[Kevin Jones]

Oh yeah, I see what you mean. I'm just using the autoscroll right out of the box. The way I am using a popup is unconventional, with stationary buttons on top that users would be going after. Normally the behaviour probably wouldn't be a problem. Thanks for pointing that one out. I can see how a delay might be kind of nice, if its not too expensive.

No, the Google thing is not intentional. I don't observe what you are experiencing with the Google tabs, on Mac or Windows. Can you copy the URLs from the location bar of the tabs that are showing up as dups, and post them here? All the addon is doing is a string comparison of the URLs. As it says in the User's Guide, you could run into that kind of thing on sites that use POST requests to display their pages, but Google as far as I know of uses encoded URLs for its searches.

[Kevin Jones]

Sorry, I actually meant "instant autoscrolling". Moving the mouse across up-scroll button area often activates scrolling for a short while, with list moving a bit, like twitching. Anyway this looks to me now as Firefox behaviour with long lists, not the addon's.

I put a slight delay on the autoscroll and I'm trying it out in my current development version. You can swipe over the scroll arrow area and it doesn't move the popup. If I don't see any problems with it, it will be in the next release.

Thanks for your input.

Allasso

[rbc]

I put a slight delay on the autoscroll and I'm trying it out in my current development version. You can swipe over the scroll arrow area and it doesn't move the popup. If I don't see any problems with it, it will be in the next release.

Thanks for your input.

Allasso

My pleasure. I like your work.

No, the Google thing is not intentional. I don't observe what you are experiencing with the Google tabs, on Mac or Windows.

It seems it may have something to do with "Google Instant Predictions" setting. At least, if I disable it, I don't see this behaviour anymore. If enabled, different search results may be shown as 'duplicated'. Tried this with randomly chosen http://www.google.pt, all language settings Portuguese.

[Kevin Jones]

Hmmm, I just tried it with "instant", and I still don't get the dup pages. The search queries are URL encoded like always. If you could copy the full URLs from a couple of pages that are showing up as dups, and post them, maybe I could tell better what is going on.

[Kevin Jones]

Okay, now I see it, yes, it happens when you use "instant", if you are bringing up your Google pages from scratch, such as with a Firefox/Google home page.

Thus is why I put the caveat about that in the User's Guide

Thanks for pointing that out. I think I will use that as an example in the User's Guide.

[reid]

Hi. Nice extension! I'm curious why it's unavailable for linux?

[Kevin Jones]

Presently I don't have a way to test it on linux. A linux user tried it out for me, but there were some bugs that made it unacceptable. I don't remember what the bugs were, but you are welcome to give it a try and see what you think.

[reid]

Ah, okay. I may give it a try then and will report back.