Anyway, I was working on the multiple pages and tabs and went to undo having closed a tab I had accidentally closed before I was finished with it, and I noticed “Pin as App Tab” in the drop down menu. That sounded interesting, so being the curious person I am, I clocked on it to try it out.

Today I decided I needed to know what it is I am playing with, so I went looking and found information on it.

App Tabs are tiny tabs that you can set to stay on your Firefox 4 window. They condense down to just the size of the website’s icon (making it vital for webmasters to learn the value of those little address bar pictures!), and move to the far left side of the other tabs. You can still easily see what each one is by hovering over it. It can not be closed on accident, because there is no close button on the tab – only the site icon. To close an App Tab you either right click on it and select “close tab” from the menu, or you unpin it and close as normal.

Additional features of the App Tabs that I have not played with yet are very promising for how handy they really are -

Say you have a GMail account and set up an App Tab to keep your GMail open in a tab. When you get new e-mail to your GMail account, the App Tab will change color to blue to alert you that the web page has changed.

App Tabs are permanent until you tell them not to be. I have spent many hours setting and resetting my startup pages based on what I need to be working on in any given week. With the App Tabs, once they are set, they stay in place. Opening again each time you start up Firefox until you tell them to stop being App Tabs. For me, this means I can open several research pages, set them as App Tabs, then shut the computer down if I need to and get back to work the next day with the same resources I had been using the night before.

And the App Tab is a permanent little fellow, links clicked on in an App Tab will open in a new tab rather than in the same tab – even if the website’s links does not normally open in new tabs. That means you never need to worry about losing the base resource when doing extensive research online. I can not count how many times I have followed a link away from a site with great information and then could not find my way back to it because I had got to skipping back and forth on sites. Now a great resource can be set as an App Tab and there is no dear of losing it until I am finished with it.

So, how do you use the App Tab? Well, first, of course, you need Firefox 4.

At the top of the screen is the tabs for all the tabs you have open in your window… hover your mouse over one of those tabs and press the right side mouse button (right click on it) it brings up a menu:

Reload Tab
—————
Pin as App Tab
Move to New Window
—————
Reload All Tabs
Bookmark All Tabs
Close Other Tabs
—————
Undo Close Tab
Close Tab

Click the left mouse button on “Pin as App Tab” and it moves the tab to the left and shrinks the tab to the size of the site icon.
To return the tab to being a normal tab, right click on it as above and in a menu that looks very similar select “unpin tab”. That’s all there is to it.

A few days ago I went hunting and found Custom Buttons, or rather Custom Buttons ².  After some trial and error (that included uninstalling it, installing the older version, then reinstalling 2, I have finally got myself a custom work browser that has only got the buttons I need for working on the toolbar.

No more extrenuous buttons and no more spending a long time sorting out how to locate the sites and programs I need to use, I can merely tap a single button on the browser’s toolbar.  No more distractions and no more wasted time searching for the site or application I need when I am trying to get work done.