Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1 has just been released. Download links for Firefox 3.6 RC1 are here for a variety of languages. If you’re curious as to what has changed, release notes highlighting known issues and caveats are also available. As usual, performance improvements are baked into this release. Mozilla also included some improved eye-candy by including Personas in Firefox 3.6. Most importantly, more of the HTML5 specification has been implemented, including the native video tag!
The final version of 3.6 is likely to be very similar to this release candidate. Unfortunately, this means if you use Windows 7, one useful new feature will be missing from this version and the final version of Firefox 3.6: taskbar previews.
With taskbar previews, every single tab you have in your Firefox windows will get their own individual thumbnail preview when you hover over the Firefox in your taskbar. Additionally, the number of icons stacked in the taskbar will reflect the number of tabs you have open. This is best illustrated with the screenshot below.
From the screenshot (larger version) you can see I have three tabs open. Thumbnail previews are shown for each of the tabs. Additionally, in the taskbar you see three stacked icons. This allows you to switch rapidly between tabs in Firefox, just from the taskbar! With Window 7′s new taskbar, this new tab interaction paradigm makes a lot of sense!
It looks like this feature is working perfectly in the screenshot, but the Firefox developers didn’t think the feature was ready to be enabled by default in 3.6. (Bugzilla #525475). From my limited testing, its not the snappiest feature on my older laptop, but it does seem to work reliably. Follow these steps to enable this feature on your computer.
Enabling Taskbar Preview in Your Firefox Profile
- Type about:config in your location bar.
- Click through the warning page.
- Search for the appropriate setting: browser.taskbar.previews.enable.
- Change the default from false to true. Once this is complete, the setting should be bold as shown below.
After you finish, you should start seeing your tabs in the taskbar previews! This setting should persist through the Firefox 3.6 release candidate process all the way to the final release of 3.6. This means you shouldn’t have to go through these steps again to re-enable this setting.
Some other Windows 7 taskbar features, like Jump Lists (Bugzilla #473045) won’t be making an appearance until Firefox 3.7 is released, likely later year (originally scheduled Spring 2010). But enabling this feature in your Firefox profile should make life a bit easier while we wait on Firefox 3.7.
One Response
Stay in touch with the conversation, subscribe to the RSS feed for comments on this post.
Continuing the Discussion