Foxpose and Optimoz
Foxpose is a Firefox extension* that shows all your tabs, shrunk, inside the window so you can choose between them. It’s obviously a blatant rip-off of OS X’s Expose, but then that’s a good UI and so using it in other places is a good idea. However, having to find the tiny icon in the Firefox status bar and click on it to do the Foxpose thing is a major pain in the arse; it means that using Foxpose is considerably slower than scanning your tab titles. Yes, there’s a hotkey, but that’s still a pain (not least because you have to focus Firefox first and then press the hotkey and then switch back to the mouse to click on a tab and…bah).
Optimoz is a Firefox extension that allows you to use “mouse gestures”: hold down a button or a hotkey and draw a shape on your Firefox window and something happens, depending on what the shape was. For example, drawing a short line from right to left does the same as pressing the Back button; drawing a squarish lower-case h (go down, up, right, down) goes to the home page, and so on. It’s most useful.
These two can be profitably combined. In Optimoz, set up a “custom” action. You can customise Optimoz by going to Tools > Extensions > Mouse Gestures > Options. From there, click Edit Mappings on the General tab. Add a new mapping with New. In Function type set Custom, in Mapping name write Foxpose, and in Custom JavaScript code write Viamatic.Xpose.Main(); (thanks to Jens Bannmann for help there!). Then click Recognize and draw a mouse gesture in the box that appears (I use a line left-to-right and then right-to-left, so my gesture is coded as RL, but pick whatever you want). OK button all the way out. You can now use your chosen mouse gesture to do the Foxpose thing. Marvellous.
o…really thanks for the information. Useful.
3 hours later
I used Optimoz for a while, and loved it. Mouse gestures take a bit of time to memorise, but they’re so much faster than having to move all over the screen and click tiny buttons–especially with how loose the extension’s interpretations are. As long as the motions generally resemble the instruction, it’ll work.
The only reason I don’t use it currently is that I’ve got a battery-powered mouse and I use it up faster when I’m waving it all over.
12 hours later
To me it’s pretty clear that Foxpose should become an Alt+Tab-like tab preview bar for Ctrl+Tab, just like the XP Power Toys version of Alt+Tab.
This way it would work with a standard keyboard shortcut/UI element and also encourage people to Ctrl+Tab because personally after so much Alt+Tab I *still* default to that when I want to switch tabs with the keyboard. Old habits die hard!
2 days later
I like the sound of the Foxpose extension, pity it just as easy to look at your actual tabs. Guess it depends how many tabs you have open at any time?
4 days later
Sionide: if you’ve got a lot of tabs open, or a few tabs all on the same site where the titles are similar, then it’s useful; it’s also, in my experience, quicker to recognise a picture of your pages than parse the first few words of the title.
4 days later