Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3 stacks up a new version

For those of us who not only need to keep dozens of Firefox tabs open at once but need to see them to remember they exist, Tab Mix Plus' upgrade to Firefox 3 compatibility is some of the week's best news.

Tabs are a great way of managing the multiple threads one follows in the course of a day, but if you operate on an "out of sight, out of mind" basis, Firefox's current horizontal scroll tends to lead to confusion (and, often, resource-wasting tab duplications).

Enter Tab Mix Plus, which allows you to stack open tabs in multiple rows for a visual representation of just how far off the rails your day is going, and offers greater ease of use for scrolling if you prefer to keep things linear.

If you require your tabs to be stacked in front of you, you've probably heard enough by now to make your downloading decision. The feature's regularly requested for Firefox itself, but for now TMP is the best available option. But the program offers other worthy features, including fast Cntl-Tab previewing in reverse order through all your open tabs (for those "I just saw that, but where...?" moments) and the ability to rename tabs for easy thematic grouping. For tab scrollers, controls can appear on the left, or the right, or both sides of the window.

Tabs can be protected and locked to keep them, respectively, from being closed inadvertently and from having some other page loaded in the tab; one might, for example, protect one's Webmail tabs to keep them always present. One keystroke combination will reload the last tab you closed, and will back you up through your closures if done repeatedly; if you're seriously prone to accidental tab closure, the option to place a close-tab button on only the current tab can be a huge improvement to the browsing experience. New Tab and Close Tab buttons can be also added to the browser as desired.

For those who prefer their tabs color-coded, Tab Mix Plus offers some mild configurability as well, though Colorful Tabs (also updated this week) still shines brightest on that front. TMP allows the user to customize text colors on the current tabs and any unloaded tabs, and the progress meter for page loads can be colorized.

Tab Mix Plus 3.0.7 adds support for Firefox versions up to 3.1b1pre, and removes it for installations before 2.0. Testing confirmed that it works seamlessly in the Firefox-based Flock browser as well.