To toggle it on you just hit a small keyboard shortcut and it zooms out all the tabs into a giant wall. You can also summon it with a small button that sits next to the address bar, or by choosing it from the right click menu. Once opened, you simply pick which tab you want to see by clicking it, or simply scrolling with your mouse wheel. It’s not nearly as smooth as Tab Effect, an eye candy tab switching add-on Rafe wrote about back in September of last year, but it’s neat nonetheless.

There are five different styles in all, and each one offers a different way to view the thumbnails you have open. My personal favorite is the standard grid view, which can be tweaked to include as many rows as you’d like. Windows Vista users are more likely to choose the stack view, which is identical to Vista’s Flip 3D. No matter what you choose, it’s a pretty svelte alternative to hunting down the page you want by favicon and text alone.

FoxTab lets you see all of your open tabs as thumbnails. You can maneuver them with your scroll wheel, or swap what type of view you'd like on the fly. (click to enlarge)

Note: This is an “experimental” add-on in Mozilla’s directory, so you must be registered there to download it.

One of my buddies just tipped me off to a must-have tab management add-on for
Firefox. It’s called FoxTab, and it’s a cross between
Mac OS X’s Expose,
Windows Vista’s Flip 3D, and the thumbnail view in Google Chrome. When you’ve got a lot of tabs open in Firefox, this offers a quick way to jump to the page you want without having to eyeball the name of each one.

Related: Surf your bookmarks by thumbnail with Bookmark Previews

(Credit:
CNET Networks)