Everyone with a desk has a stack of papers. You know the one. It starts with a repair receipt for your Honda. Under that is a jury summons…dig deeper and find a flyer for a yoga workshop, another for a band needing a bassist, and an 8 x 11″ sheet calling for volunteers at the local kitty rescue.  All these once had potential, and maybe they still do…

But at some point most of us pick up this stack of papers, rustle, reorder, rearrange, become a rock star, save a kitten, take yoga, and then start all over again with a new stack.

Reorganizing papers would be tricky if you couldn’t touch them, line them up and look at them all at the same time. Think about browser tabs in the same way, and you realize things could be easier if tabs were as 3D as your stack of papers. And that’s where FoxTab comes in.

After you install FoxTab, click on the icon in your browser’s toolbar. You may need to go to View->Toolbars->Customize and drag the icon onto your toolbar:

Click the icon and your screen fills with a view of all the sites for which tabs are currently open. You can change the formatting of your view to Carousel, Row, Grid, Wall, Page Flow or Stack. Here’s Page Flow:

You can also format your 3D view. Do you want the image tilted slightly away from you? To the right? Left? Toward you? Centered?

And you can change the color that appears behind these 3D site slices. Or pick an image for that background:

Turns out you can view more than just your opened tabs. In the top left of your FoxTab view, you’ll see three choices:

When you first click “My Top Sites”, you won’t see anything at all. You have to tell FoxTab which sites are the tops. Just right click when you’re visiting a site and select “Add to Top Sites”:

Grouping and filtering features let you find tabs based on common sites of origin (including duplicates) and search based on key words that appear in the url. FoxTab has a ton of features for even the fussiest among us, so take some time to play with options.

Post from Elise Allen, who once bought a bigger desk to avoid sorting a stack of papers . See all posts by Elise Allen.