Bar Tab 1.5.1

Friday, Apr 30, 2010

Like having tabs? Like having lots of tabs? Take control over your tabs and enjoy speedy browsing with BarTab.

Has this ever happened to you?  You walk into a coffee shop, fire up your browser and all eighty of your tabs start loading… loading… loading… and when they all load they all say “Welcome to the Coffee Shop, click ‘Agree’ to continue.”  Now you have to click agree eighty times and hit the back button on eighty different tabs. If only this could have been avoided.  If only just one of the eighty tabs would have opened and asked for you to “agree” that “yes, you love coffee and free wifi and puppies.”

But wait!  With BarTab you can! With BarTab, when you start Firefox, a tab only loads a web page if it’s been clicked on.  You can avoid future coffee shop catastrophes (note: if you spill coffee on yourself in excitement… Bar Tab cannot help you)

Even better, BarTab can help you browse faster. For example, you might spend the weekend planning a trip to Europe and have a bunch of tabs open: hotels in Bonn, where to eat for cheap in Paris, where to exchange your currency into Euros, how to swear in Dutch and so forth.  Come Monday morning, you need to get into the daily grind.  You open up whatever tabs you need to get work done… but you’re not done researching your getaway.  Using BarTab, you can set Firefox to unload those pages until you’re ready to view them again.

This keeps Firefox fast, and you don’t have to lose all that work you did to plan your trip.  Just click on the tab to make the page(s) load again.
So if you want all the tabs, with none of the guilt — give BarTab a try.

Post from Dave Dash, an engineer who loves tabs, coffee and travel

13 comments

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  1. donavon

    Im new and im going to try it out now thanks.

    April 30th, 2010 at 11:23 pm

    Reply

  2. George

    I find that tab mix plus has the same features and many more.

    May 4th, 2010 at 7:35 am

    Reply

    1. Leslie D. Martin

      George, there are really that many features in common between Bar Tab and Tab Mix or Tab Mix Plus (other than the ability to select which tab gets the focus when closing the current tab). I look at them more as being companion pieces.

      June 5th, 2010 at 2:56 am

      Reply

      1. Leslie D. Martin

        Oops. Meant to say “there really *AREN’T* that many features in common….” Sorry. Too early in the a.m. and I haven’t have my first cup of coffee yet.

        June 5th, 2010 at 2:57 am

        Reply

  3. DiscoMcDisco

    This is a nice idea, I’m going to test it out with Tab Mix Plus… which (for me) is the best and most configurable Tab plugin ever…

    I wonder if BarTab could get align options? For Example, Left align for home, right align for work (essentially like having two tab bars in the space of one)… that would be cool…

    Good work on this, and worth the shout..

    May 4th, 2010 at 8:26 am

    Reply

  4. Driverzx

    Swear in Dutch, i love it.

    May 4th, 2010 at 10:12 am

    Reply

  5. Matt

    So simple, so brilliant, makes you wonder why this isn’t the default behavior or at least an option.

    May 4th, 2010 at 12:25 pm

    Reply

  6. David

    Perfect Add-on for speed and performance from having multiple Tabs open at once. Been waiting for the Mozilla Gods to answer my prayers…. And Bartab 1.5 was sent to me… Thanks guys keep up the GREAT work!

    May 4th, 2010 at 3:19 pm

    Reply

  7. Christian

    Wow! This is a great add-on, I would go as far to say some of these features should native to firefox but until then… Rock on

    May 4th, 2010 at 4:16 pm

    Reply

  8. Dave Dash

    Matt, Christian –

    This might just happen.

    -d

    May 12th, 2010 at 11:45 am

    Reply

  9. OME

    wow…great add on…..really like it

    May 21st, 2010 at 8:53 pm

    Reply

  10. Pingback from Digsby, pidgen, tweetdeck and other tools. | onlineme

    [...] Bartab Tired of having FireFox fall over because you want more than 1 gig of memory used in your open tabs? This is an excellent solution. Thank you Alex Leonard. [...]

    June 11th, 2010 at 4:07 am

    Reply

  11. suri

    This is my first comment about a firefox add-on….I just had to say thanks! I read the description to my bf, and he could not believe someone had made an add-on so perfect for me. He is always giving me a hard time about my tabs…sometimes I have resorted to opening a window of IE in order to keep my tabs…
    thanks again!

    June 28th, 2010 at 8:45 pm

    Reply

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