An Update for Firefox 3.6′s Taskbar Previews

Previously I pointed out how you could turn on Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Release Candidate 1′s taskbar previews in Windows 7. Unfortunately, after a while the tab previews would no longer appear, leaving only an unhelpful spinning “loading” indicator.

This flakiness was enough for the feature to be disabled by default in the final version of Firefox 3.6 that shipped several weeks ago. Fortunately, the developer assigned to fix this bug thinks he has isolated the problem and has offered a solution. Best of all, the solution may be applied by the average user given some simple instructions.

If you haven’t already, enable taskbar previews by following the instructions I listed in my earlier post.

In Comment #61 of Bug 522262, the following solution is offered:

Close Firefox. Find the folder modules/ where Firefox is installed. Edit the
file ‘WindowsPreviewPerTab.jsm’ in notepad.

Replaced line 422:

let preview =
AeroPeek.taskbar.createTaskbarTabPreview(this.tabbrowser.docShell, controller);

with

let preview =
AeroPeek.taskbar.createTaskbarTabPreview(tab.linkedBrowser.docShell,
controller);

Save, start Firefox. Seems to be working so far, I only see the spinning
circles for a split second then the previews appear.

I applied this fix to my installation of Firefox 3.6 and can report I have not had any issues since. Mozilla is working out the details on releasing this fix, but by following the simple instructions above, you won’t have to wait!