Often, when you "pop out" a window from Chrome (like a Google Talk chat), it loses its ability to be grouped with other tabs. Here's how to turn a popped out window into a tabbed window so you can de-clutter your desktop. More »

If you haven't played with Chrome OS yet, it has one fundamental niggle that harkens back to the DOS days of yore: windows don't exist, and it has no way of displaying multiple tabs on screen at the same time. This means if you want to refer to a document while you compose an email, you need to repetitively switch between tabs -- and I think we can all agree that tab-switching is one of the most important omissions from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Chrome OS does support one way of displaying multiple Web pages at the same time, however: panels. If you've looked through our Chromium OS galleries (or taken a quick look at the screenshot above) you'll notice some always-on-top panels across the bottom of the screen. Panels are handy things -- capable of being resized, or quickly popped down out of view. By default, the download manager, popped-out Gmail chat windows and the media player display in panels -- but, for some reason, there's no way to load custom websites in panels.

Which brings us onto our very first Chrome OS-specific extension: Panelize. With Panelize you can put anything into a panel, such as Gmail, Reader, or even Download Squad. In one fell swoop, having to switch between tabs is a thing of the past!

For Linux users who have been using the dev build of Google Chrome, you can now head over to the “about:labs” page and enjoy some Labs feature.

The “about:labs” page has been around for the Linux build for quite some time, but unlike the Windows version, nothing was available. In the latest update of Google Chrome, the “about:labs” now comes with several features like Tabbed Settings, Remoting, Page Info Bubble, Disable outdated plug-ins, XSS Auditor and Background WebApps.

Here’s a short breakdown of what each feature does:

Tabbed Settings

Instead of a new window, the Chrome Settings is now opened in a new tab.

Remoting

Allows Remoting Client support.

Page Info Bubble

The page info is now shown as an info bubble instead of a dialog window.

Disable outdated plug-ins

As its name implies, disable outdated plugins to reduce security vulnerability

XSS Auditor

Enables WebKit’s XSS Auditor (cross-site scripting protection). This feature aims to protect you from certain attacks of malicious web sites. It improves your security, but it might not be compatible with all web sites.

Background WebApps

Run installed web apps in the background at system startup and even after all windows are closed.

Activating about:labs features

1. Ensure that you are using a dev build of Google Chrome (you can get the deb file here)

2. Open a new tab and type “about:labs” (without the quotes) in the URL bar.

3. Choose the feature you want and click the “Enable” link.

4. Restart Google Chrome

That’s it.

We all know that Firefox 4 comes with plenty of interesting and useful features. However, there is one feature that really annoy me out of hell – the tab preview feature (only available for Windows 7).

Here’s what happen: Let’s assume that your Firefox browser is opened with plenty of tabs, but it is not currently your active application (you might be doing some work in Ms. Office). When you hover your mouse above the Firefox icon in the taskbar, it will show a preview of all the opened tabs. This is good and fine as I can now pick the tab that I want to go to. The bad part is, I don’t want to manually select the tab everytime. When I click on the Firefox icon, I would expect it to switch to the browser immediately and load my last active tab, not to make me select the tab. /> id="more-20681"> />

Windows only: If you keep a copy of Chrome's bleeding-edge Canary build on hand, you can check out Chrome's optional Side Tabs feature right now. Update Canary, activate a "Labs" feature, and you're a right-click away from vertical tabs. More »

Tab Candy for Firefox isn't even officially out yet, and there's already a Chrome competitor; TabSense presents you with a list of your current browser tabs, divided by window.

It gets points for effort, but at this stage, TabSense definitely feels half-baked. Clicking the name of a tab doesn't actually activate it, but it detaches it from its current group (window). Dragging tabs from group to group does work, though, and it causes the tab to move between windows, which is pretty cool. The extension doesn't pop up a whole bunch of Chrome windows. Instead, you see only one window, and all of the others are hidden. That's nice, too.

There's a quick-search box in the top-right corner, which allows you to search tabs by name, and it does work (it highlights the tab that you're looking for). There are no thumbnails. Also, the groups are temporary and were not saved when I quit Chrome.

The main problem at the moment is with activating tabs; I was unable to actually show the tab that I tried to access. As I said, clicking it didn't work. But still, this alpha-grade extension shows some promise, even if it lacks most of Tab Candy's "wow" factor.

The extension is still unfinished, but TabCandy has come a long way since I first checked it out -- and it's definitely fun to play with now even if it's not quite ready for prime time. You can find the TabCandy.XPI on Mozilla's server (it's near the bottom of the list).

Who knows -- you could be looking at the tab management interface for Firefox 4!

(worth noting: Mozilla's Aza Raskin has gotten in touch with Sebastian and reports that the .XPI is somewhat out of date. Still, it's the easiest way to play with TabCandy if you're so inclined.)

Filed under: Mozilla, Beta, Browsers

Looking for nice, minimal tab manager extension for Google Chrome? Have a look at -- what else -- Tab Manager.

It's perfect for the number of tabs I usually have open (fifteen or less) but it may not be quite so well-suited to those of you who have dozens of tabs open simultaneously. Tab Manager only displays favicons and there are no tooltips to display a tab's title -- which make things a bit confusing when you've got multiple pages open on the same website.

For those of us who tend to keep tabs to a relative minimum, however, Tab Manager works nicely. Your Chrome windows are divided by a vertical rule, and you can drag tabs to re-order them in the current window -- or even drag and drop them between different windows.

Tab Manager will even work with your Incognito windows, provided you've checked off the box on your chrome:extensions page to allow it. They're outlined in red on the pop-up. Crossover isn't allowed, however -- you can't drag between Icognito windows and regular windows because Chrome doesn't allow us to do that.

We've already shown you how to organize Chrome's Aero Peek thumbnails, but reader coreyog writes in to show us that that's not all you can do—you can also see thumbnails for all of your open tabs. More »