Product Reviews

If you have ever had the opportunity to use Firefox, you will no doubt know that having too many tabs open at once soon gets confusing, and it can become difficult to find the particular one that you are after. Firefox Showcase makes this job considerably easier by providing a thumbnail-view of all your open tabs. All you have to do is to click on the one you want.

As with other Firefox plug-ins, you install Showcase simply by navigating to the URL provided and pressing the big green Install Now button. The entire process takes only a couple of minutes.

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Once the plug-in is installed, you press F12 to open the Showcase window. This displays each tab as a thumbnail image that updates automatically every half a second. Selecting a thumbnail will take you straight to that tab, but you can also close unwanted or unused tabs.

If you don't like this arrangement, you can dock the thumbnails in a new tab, although you do then have the problem of finding Showcase. One of its best features is the Sidebar option, which docks a vertical list of thumbnails on the left of your screen for easy access. A search bar enables you to search all your open websites for a keyword, which makes it even easier to get at the tab you want.

The range of configuration options is extensive for such an apparently simple plug-in. For example, you can set the minimum thumbnail size, the colour scheme, whether the thumbnail expands when the mouse is over it, how the thumbnails are updated if the content of the tabs changes, and much more besides.

You don't need to touch any of the options if you don't want to, and Showcase works straight away. If you often work with a lot of tabs, this is an essential download.