[Ext] App Tabs 0.6.2 - inspired by Firefox 4 planned feature

[********]

App Tabs is inspired by a feature by the same name planned for Firefox 4.0!

See screenshots or write a review here: App Tabs @ addons.mozilla.org
Get the latest version here (only 8KB): App Tabs 0.6.2 @ addons.mozilla.org

App Tabs succeeds and improves upon Pin Tab, which was probably mistakenly deleted by AMO's site administrators.

App Tabs is also a feature planned for Firefox 4.0!

Making a tab into an app tab moves it to the left side of the tab bar and shrinks it to the size of its favicon.
App tabs can be created by right-clicking a tab and selecting "App Tab", ctrl+clicking the tab (this shortcut can be customized), or dragging a tab to the region of existing app tabs.
Likewise, app tabs will return to being normal tabs if you ctrl+click an app tab or drag it to the region of normal tabs.

Options:
- App tabs can be saved across sessions! (default)
- App tabs can be merged when closing a window. (default)
- App tabs can be protected from being closed individually.
Note: A window containing app tabs can still be closed. This is where merging comes in handy!

* Hidden feature! *
If you have Tabberwocky installed, you can have App Tabs automatically lock app tabs that you create. Enable this feature by going to about:config and setting extensions.apptabs.lock to true.

App Tabs works especially well with the Strata40 theme, which is inspired by the Firefox 4.0 mockups.

* KNOWN ISSUES *
- App Tabs is not compatible with Tab Mix Plus. This is because Tab Mix Plus heavily modifies the tab browsing code of Firefox in such a way that App Tabs cannot implement its features without conflict. This will not likely be resolved. It is in fact very difficult to make these compatible.
- App Tabs is incompatible with many themes on Mac OS X. This will be fixed in a future release.
If your app tabs are appearing too narrow or simply disappearing, try setting extensions.apptabs.expand in about:config to true and restarting Firefox. If that doesn't work, please report the details of the buggy appearance, including your theme and add-ons configuration, in the thread.

Have fun with your App Tabs!

[aronin]

Hey - just continuing from the other thread... the reason I feel this can be included in Tabberwocky is because almost 50% of this extension is already included in there (i.e. lock and protect). So shouldn't take many lines of code to implement the 'Pin' feature as well.

Regarding the bug, I can reproduce it even on a clean profile (Firefox 3.6 Beta 1):
- Open a few tabs (5 -6)
- Pin 1 or 2 tabs
- Now open a new tab
- The close buttons on the background tabs disappear

[********]

Hey - just continuing from the other thread... the reason I feel this can be included in Tabberwocky is because almost 50% of this extension is already included in there (i.e. lock and protect). So shouldn't take many lines of code to implement the 'Pin' feature as well.

Regarding the bug, I can reproduce it even on a clean profile (Firefox 3.6 Beta 1):
- Open a few tabs (5 -6)
- Pin 1 or 2 tabs
- Now open a new tab
- The close buttons on the background tabs disappear

Yep, I see this bug too, but only intermittently. I fixed this by hacking Firefox's tab strip adjustment code and also the urlbar/awesomebar bug (which was due to a mistake in order of operations (who would have thunk?!)) in version 0.3, which will be up in an hour or so. Be sure to read Pin Tab 0.3's updated description (on the addons.mozilla.org or in the first post of this thread) to learn how to get Tabberwocky's lock tab feature to integrate automatically with Pin Tab!

Regarding the inclusion of Pin Tab in Tabberwocky: have patience, my friend. Thanks to efficient programming, Pin Tab's core script is only 200 lines long (excluding comments and whitespace), but integrating it involves more than just grafting it onto Tabberwocky. I will include it once I think Pin Tab has a solid, stable build.

Thanks for all your feedback and support!

[aronin]

Just checked out the new version... everything is super perfect now!! Even the 'Private Browsing' thing has been resolved. And infact I had already been using the 'Locked' and 'Protect' tabs feature of Tabberwocky with this extension earlier.

Dude - you are one efficient programmer... 200 lines??? I mean thats ridiculously low , so I have a challenge/request for you... but since thats related to Tabberwocky, will put that in the other thread...

[Duke D]

First let me say that I love the extension, the addresbar-to-new-tab is a fantastic feature. My only concern is with the fact that the pinned tabs seem a bit wider than I would like them.

Is there a css code you could give me to make them a bit thinner?

[aronin]

Ok, the 'Private Browsing Mode' bug seems to exist still - i.e. when I enter Private Browsing mode, my Pinned Tabs go along with me. They should ideally close.

[vrienduinen]

I use Chromin Frame and the Chromifox Basic Theme. Pin Tab does not work with this setup.
Faviconize does work with these so I will stick with Faviconize for now.

[hansondr]

I'm experiencing a bug on OSX 10.6 (FF v3.5.4). It seems as if the pinned tab doesn't have any width associated with it so any other regular tabs seem to flow underneath. If I pin multiple tabs they layer one on top of each other (last to be pinned on top). Here is a screenshot:

[kine]

This is pretty neat, but i have a comment as well:

When i have a pinned tab in focus, and then i open a new tab, it automatically makes the new tab pinned as well. For example, say i'm on my pinned Gmail tab and i decide that i want to read BBC News. So i go up to my Bookmarks bar and click on BBC News (which opens in a new tab to the right of the current one, thanks to Tabberwocky) — suddenly i've got a new pinned tab with BBC News in it.

edit: Actually, to be more accurate, this only happens when you have another pinned tab to the right of the one you're focussed on it. If you're focussed on the right-most pinned tab then it works as expected.

I think ideally what should happen when i'm on a pinned tab is that any new tabs should be opened as a standard tab based on your tab-opening preferences. For example, if you're like me and you have tabs set to open next to the current one, then your new tab should open as close to the pinned tab as possible (i.e., it should become the first non-pinned tab). If you have your tabs set to always open at the end, then of course a new tab opened from a pinned tab should always open at the end.

As it stands, i always have to open new tabs from a separate blank non-pinned tab or else tab creation won't work properly.

[********]

First let me say that I love the extension, the addresbar-to-new-tab is a fantastic feature. My only concern is with the fact that the pinned tabs seem a bit wider than I would like them.
Is there a css code you could give me to make them a bit thinner?

This should do it:

Code: Select all

tab[pinned=true] .tab-icon-image {
   margin-left: 5px !important; /* change the default 5px in each line to a smaller number */
   margin-right: 5px !important;
}

Ok, the 'Private Browsing Mode' bug seems to exist still - i.e. when I enter Private Browsing mode, my Pinned Tabs go along with me. They should ideally close.

This only occurs if you set Firefox not to remember your browsing sessions. I have an inkling of how to fix this bug, but the problem is that some users set their Firefox to start in Private Browsing automatically and these users may still want their pinned tabs to carry over, since they use them a bit like homepage tabs... I'll figure this out in a future release.

I use Chromin Frame and the Chromifox Basic Theme. Pin Tab does not work with this setup.
Faviconize does work with these so I will stick with Faviconize for now.

I see. Pin Tab is not guaranteed to work with all themes. I will try to fix this when I have time.

I'm experiencing a bug on OSX 10.6 (FF v3.5.4). It seems as if the pinned tab doesn't have any width associated with it so any other regular tabs seem to flow underneath. If I pin multiple tabs they layer one on top of each other (last to be pinned on top). ...

Thanks for the bug report. I do not have a Mac myself, so I cannot test this. Do you have any other tabbed browsing extensions that might conflict with Pin Tab?

When i have a pinned tab in focus, and then i open a new tab, it automatically makes the new tab pinned as well. For example, say i'm on my pinned Gmail tab and i decide that i want to read BBC News. So i go up to my Bookmarks bar and click on BBC News (which opens in a new tab to the right of the current one, thanks to Tabberwocky) — suddenly i've got a new pinned tab with BBC News in it.

edit: Actually, to be more accurate, this only happens when you have another pinned tab to the right of the one you're focussed on it. If you're focussed on the right-most pinned tab then it works as expected.

I think ideally what should happen when i'm on a pinned tab is that any new tabs should be opened as a standard tab based on your tab-opening preferences. For example, if you're like me and you have tabs set to open next to the current one, then your new tab should open as close to the pinned tab as possible (i.e., it should become the first non-pinned tab). If you have your tabs set to always open at the end, then of course a new tab opened from a pinned tab should always open at the end.

As it stands, i always have to open new tabs from a separate blank non-pinned tab or else tab creation won't work properly.

Absolutely, I am aware of this bug but have no idea how to fix it, since Firefox's tabbed browsing API is not constructed in a way that makes it easy to implement pinned tabs. I looked at how Google Chrome's Pin Tab feature functions and it works just fine with regards to the bug you're reporting. Perhaps, I should take a look at Chromium's code.

Thanks for the feedback!

[kine]

Thanks!

I've one more (small) bug: The order of the pinned tabs seems to change when i restart my browser. For example, say i have two pinned tabs — Gmail on the left and reddit on the right. Then say i close Firefox and restart. When the window re-appears, the order of the pinned tabs will be reversed (Gmail on the right and reddit on the left). Not sure why that happens.


By the way, this will fix the bug with the default Mac theme:

Code: Select all

.tabbrowser-tab[pinned="true"] {
   min-width: 28px !important; /* or whatever value you'd like */
}

(I guess it wouldn't hurt to have a min-width set for pinned tabs regardless of the theme used, actually, now that i think of it.)


edit:
This is what i use for the GrApple theme. Not sure if anyone cares, but it's a popular theme for Mac users, so it might be of use to someone:

Code: Select all

/* unhide favicons in pinned tabs */
.tabbrowser-tab[pinned="true"] .tab-icon-image {
   opacity: 0.75 !important;
}
.tabbrowser-tab[pinned="true"][selected="true"] .tab-icon-image {
   opacity: 1.0 !important;
}
/* hide close buttons in pinned tabs */
.tabbrowser-tab[pinned="true"] > .tab-close-button {
   visibility: collapse !important;
}
/* fix margins */
.tabbrowser-tab[pinned="true"] {
   padding-left: 1px !important;
   /* i actually use a padding of 6px for both right and left, but this is the bare minimum if you don't like the tabs as wide as i do */
}

[flooorian]

Is it just me or was Pin Tab removed from the site?
I always get add-on not found when I use the provided link.

[vsub]

What a luck,just when I wanted to try it again after seeing the line about the hidden option the add-on is nowhere to be found.

[aronin]

Is it gone? like really gone for good? or gone for Tabberwocky Thank God I had it installed already!

[kine]

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/702860/pintab.xpi

Here's the installer if you need this extension immediately for some reason. It should be exactly the same as what was on AMO (i just zipped up the extension directory in my profile folder), but obviously you install it at your own risk.