Currently, there's a pre-release agreement/license that you need to agree to before grabbing thumbstrips. There's also an MPL license included in the actual extension files themselves. Which of these takes precedence?
I would like to fix a few feature additions that I see would be useful, but can't currently do this with the pre-release license that I agreed to on download. This is a significant issue for me, as I'm used to being able to improve the software I run (I run linux and other Free Software like firefox for a reason).
Could the licenses be more clear? Either removing the MPL, or removing the pre-release license? Also, when will the pre-release be over, and will it be released as true MPL, or will another license be inserted in it's place? I suppose I ask because if there will be a restrictive license that does not comply with the OSI requirements, I need to look into building my own tool that achieves the same result and functionality, but is useful to the Open Source world as a whole.
I suggest storing separate thumb strips for each active tab. Many people browse the web in a parallel fashion: browsing for restaurants in a review forum, comparing several restaurants in multiple tabs, viewing menus in other tabs and locating those restaurants in a tab with an interactive map. Moreover, each of these tabs will likely have a history of pages relating to the page currently in view.
When a web browser presents the histories of all of these tabs as a single merged strip of pages, the pages of the multiple tabs can become intermingled. For example, a page viewed 30 minutes ago in a first tab will be separated from the page currently in the first tab by a host of pages from other tabs. Accordingly, a user is faced with the extra burden of discerning which pages in the merged strip correspond to the site in the tab focus and then choosing from those pages the actual page of interest. Including separate tab histories for each tab allows a person to move back and forth between pages related to a single tab without having to first discern which pages in a merged strip correspond to the site in the tab focus.
Since I have never programmed for Firefox I am unfamiliar with the API and cannot offer specific advice, but the general idea is 1) detect all new tabs (whether opened singly or together, such as when a previous browser history with multiple tabs is loaded at startup); 2) uniquely identify all new tabs; 3) determine which active tab has the focus; 4) detect and store newly loaded pages in a strip dedicated to the active tab; 5) detect a tab closure; 6) identify the closed tab and 7) flush that tab's strip. All the while, ThumbStrips can also maintain a single merged strip as it currently does. In that case, instead of storing a duplicate image of each page, each page can be tagged with a tab ID and a tab-specific strip can be presented as a filtered strip based on the tab ID. This latter option may be preferably considering ThumbStrips already includes a strip filtering mechanism.
This suggestion was made once before (Peter, ThumbStrips 1.5 Comment Archive at comment 53, 23 February 2008), but I am very interested in seeing it realized. Currently, the lack of tab-sensitive strips prevents the practical use of this otherwise outstanding extension.
Excellent add-on! Strongly recommended. Just one question: How to have the TS icon show ONLY in the Status Bar (lower right) and NOT in the Navigation Toolbar (which is already overloaded?) I do not find anything in the Preferences. Thanks for helping
I use a widescreen monitor. What with my toolbars and Thumbstrips it doesn't leave much room for the web page.
Can the Thumbstrips be moved to the right hand side of a page rather than along the bottom ?
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Dragonfyre13
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on October 24, 2008 17:32
thumbstrips_jonathan (Official Rep)
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on July 25, 2008 03:21
Scott (Official Rep)
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on July 14, 2008 14:04
