Tab Preview Discussion

Ted Mielczarek · Post by **Ted Mielczarek** » June 6th, 2005, 11:43 am

You need a Firefox 1.5 beta to use this extension.

http://ted.mielczarek.org/code/mozilla/tabpreview/
EDIT: updated to 0.3

Displays a thumbnail of background tab content when you mouse over them. Now includes an options panel to change preview size, among other things.

jc1985 · Post by **jc1985** » June 6th, 2005, 11:49 am

(copy from the firefox thread)

Ted,
i've noticed something else. I've the TabMix extension installed, and the "tabs fit their content" option turned on. When I visit a webpage with a short title, the tab's width is very small. the problem is that the width of the thumbnail is the same one, so the preview is very small too. Would it be possible to make the width of the thumbnails fixed ?

Ria · Post by **Ria** » June 6th, 2005, 11:59 am

See http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... 73#1519873

Would like it to work with the tabs on the bottom

Ted Mielczarek · Post by **Ted Mielczarek** » June 6th, 2005, 11:59 am

jc1985: I've been thinking about this anyway, when you get a lot of tabs the previews get really tiny anyway.

RE: tabs at the bottom of the browser. Works for me. Albeit not if the preview would run off the bottom of the screen.

Ria · Post by **Ria** » June 6th, 2005, 12:04 pm

Yup

But can't they go upwards?

EDIT: they can go upwards, but only a fraction of a second:

chuonthis · Post by **chuonthis** » June 6th, 2005, 12:08 pm

I'm getting inverted colors in the preview. I've tried with a new profile and also an existing one with tons of extensions. Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050606 Firefox/1.0+ (beast)

Ted Mielczarek · Post by **Ted Mielczarek** » June 6th, 2005, 12:09 pm

chuonthis: On all pages, or just some pages? If it's just some, can you give me an example?

Ria: I'll look at it, but I won't promise anything. I'm not even sure how I'd determine that your tabs were at the bottom of the browser from my code.

rtilson · Post by **rtilson** » June 6th, 2005, 1:18 pm

Wow, Ted, this has to be one of the coolest looking extensions I've seen since ForecastFox.
BTW, I thought I saw someone ask about disabling tab tooltips when using this. Try putting this in user.js or setting in about:config as appropriate:

Code: Select all

user_pref("browser.chrome.toolbar_tips", false);

And as has been mentioned, the preview scales smaller as tabs get smaller. Wouldn't it be simpler to use a fixed size for the preview?

chuonthis · Post by **chuonthis** » June 6th, 2005, 1:29 pm

The inversion is on all pages. For example, <a href="http://www.chuonthis.com">chuonthis.com</a> ends up looking like

Ted Mielczarek · Post by **Ted Mielczarek** » June 6th, 2005, 1:44 pm

chuonthis: Odd, I can't reproduce that on a nightly build or my own build (vc6 and vc7.1 respectively). What are your system specs? (OS, graphics card are probably most important.) It might be a bug in cairo.

rtilson: That pref disables all tooltips. I think I've found a decent way to disable them, I'll try it out in a bit. As for preview size, I think I am going to make them a fixed size, maybe 1/4 of the browser width.

Bloodeye · Post by **Bloodeye** » June 6th, 2005, 2:03 pm

Yeah, I think your going to have to go big on the preview size for it to be any value. The problem with scaling, is there seems to be bad interpolation when reducing the size. If it's too small, I've found myself looking at the preview trying to determine what I'm looking at...which kinda defeats the purpose.

BTW: Ted do you know if it's possible to save the results of the preview to image\disk? Just wondering, because if you could then maybe a Bookmarks Preview Extension would be a nice little tool. I played around a little with ctx.drawImage to display an image and it worked fine for gifs, but not jpgs for some reason.

Ted Mielczarek · Post by **Ted Mielczarek** » June 6th, 2005, 2:14 pm

Bloodeye: you can't currently save canvas contents. See bug 291218 (canvas .toDataURL() implementation)

rtilson · Post by **rtilson** » June 6th, 2005, 2:52 pm

Ted Mielczarek wrote:rtilson: That pref disables all tooltips. I think I've found a decent way to disable them, I'll try it out in a bit.

Yeah, I know, but it was something to try. If you have a fix, that's even better.

As for preview size, I think I am going to make them a fixed size, maybe 1/4 of the browser width.

I don't have an opinion about the specific size until I see it, but 25% sounds like a good start.

chuonthis · Post by **chuonthis** » June 6th, 2005, 3:18 pm

I'm currently on Windows 2000 with onboard Intel 815 video. I'll try it on an XP Radeon 9000 later tonight. I searched for canvas color bugs and found a couple. Not sure which ones apply...I see you've marked all of them as dupes of <a href="https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=293353">bug 293353</a>. (Just noticed something funny...looking at the preview of this tab, the colors in my screenshot are corrected because they're inverted twice.)

Post by **James** » June 7th, 2005, 2:22 am

While the Tab Preview 0.1 extension is cool, I seem to have to double left-click everytime I want to switch tabs now (not sure if that was intended or) along with often having to double middle-click to close them. The tabs work fine if the Tab Preview extension is disabled.

I'm not using any tab related extensions except for Tab Preview.

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8b2) Gecko/20050607 Firefox/1.0+ ID:2005060701