Stacked Browsing (and other Extensions)

While I’m browsing the web, I use Firefox tabs as a sort of “browsing stack”. I tend to start out on something, and then branch off into other things by opening them into a new tab. As I finish with a given page, I’ll close pages until I’ve again found a page of relevance from which I continue to work. This works particularly well when I’m checking my RSS feeds on Bloglines.

Occaisionally, however, I will find a page that I want to save for later reading. For example, this interesting article on .NET memory optimization came through this afternoon on the MSDN Just Published feed. Being a typical geek, I of course clicked on the link for reading. I was busy, however, and didn’t want to spend the time reading it right now. Oridinarily, this would screw up my stack, since now I would have to continually skip over this page when closing tabs; and if I make a mistake, I have to go find the article again.

Except not anymore. I found a sweet little plugin for Firefox called miniT. It lets me drag and drop tabs to re-arrange them. Oh the joy of being able to move something down on the stack!

This is yet another reason I love Firefox. There are just so many cool and useful extensions out there! My extension list currently consists of:

• AdBlock - Removes advertisements using a simple wildcard scheme.
• mozCC - Discovers Creative Commons metadata on the web pages I visit, and displays icons describing it in the status bar.
• jsLib - A utility library installed and used by mozCC.
• LiveLines - Modifies the Firefox Live Bookmarks icon to drop me on the BlogLines feed subscription page, instead of adding a worthless-to-me live bookmark.
• Live HTTP Headers - Lets me capture HTTP header exchanges on the fly.
• miniT - Allows me to rearrange open tabs.