BrianJarrett.com

When Internet Explorer 7 came out a while back I first noticed that they’d finally gotten up to speed with many of the features Firefox had already introduced years ago. I still think IE sucks but that’s a personal opinion that I’ll save for another time. At least they finally decided to do a little work on this dog and try to keep it relevant.

It seems that Microsoft had now succeeded in keeping up with the Joneses but still has not surpassed the functionality contained within Firefox. There was one little feature, however, that IE introduced that default Firefox did not contain; it provided a page of thumbnails for each tab that was open which allowed a user to quickly choose an open tab. Firefox 2.0 introduced a tab button on the far right which displays a list of open tabs but no visual representation. It accomplishes the same thing but without the eye candy. To the disdain of many Linux geeks I do like eye candy; working with your computer should be a pleasing experience and it is nice if things are polished.

Since Firefox 2.0 didn’t seem to contain this functionality I did some searching and quickly found a plugin which did provide this functionality. It’s called Showcase and you can read about it and download it here.

This little plugin is exactly what I wanted. It appears as a toolbar icon and, with one click, can display a new tab containing thumbnail images for each open tab. Whatever page is being displayed in a tab is displayed as a thumbnail. A user can then simply click the thumbnail for the open tab they’d like to navigate to and the Showcase tab automatically closes and the chosen tab is now displayed. It’s eye candy but I like it.

Now it appears once again that Microsoft has done nothing with IE but play catch up; everything available in IE, aside from maybe forced ubiquity, exists with more maturity in Firefox.