FAQ

0. HALP! It doesn't work on Firefox XYZ!

I know, I'm sorry. Unfortunately I haven't yet found the time to make it work properly -- I now work on Firefox full-time and that takes priority. Please read my blog post on the Future of BarTab.

1. I don't want unloaded tabs to be greyed out. Can you change that?

We might change the way unloaded tabs appear in the UI in the future. For now you can customize it yourself using the userChrome.css file in your profile directory:

1. Go to about:support
2. Click the button next to Profile Directory to open your profile directory in Explorer/Finder/...
3. Find the chrome subdirectory and create a file called userChrome.css with the following contents in it:

.tabbrowser-tab[ontap=true] { opacity: 1.0 !important; }

to make the tab label and icon appear with full opacity. You can of course also apply any other CSS style you like to unloaded tabs.

2. Why won't BarTab show the right icon and title for unloaded tabs?

BarTab tries its best to find the page's title and favicon in your browsing history. So if you've visited the page in question before, chances are good that they're displayed. Beyond that there's little BarTab can do. Getting the page to find out its title and favicon would of course completely defeat the point of not loading the page in the first place.

3. BarTab should do <insert some do-what-I-mean tab loading/unloading behaviour here> because that's how I use tabs. Can you do that?

We would certainly like to explore some ways of making BarTab adapt to the user's tab browsing behaviour in the future. That said, there are lots of ways that people use tabs and it's almost impossible for BarTab to cater to everyone's needs. Thankfully, technologies like JetPack allow us to encapsulate custom loading/unloading behaviour in very little code, so hopefully there'll be lots of interesting add-ons that make use of BarTab's API. Take a look at BarTabUnflash for an example.

4. Can you make thumbnail previews work for unloaded tabs?

This is a problem I'd love to solve since there are quite a few places where thumbnail previews for tabs can play an important role in the browser UI. However, this isn't an easy problem to solve. Of course by the very nature of BarTab, we will never be able to provide thumbnails for pages that have never ever been loaded. But we might be able to persist thumbnails for pages that have been visited recently. That said there are some important performance implications to consider. This isn't an easy problem and we want to get it right.

5. BarTab is rubbish! It doesn't help at all with Firefox's memory consumption!

I'm sorry that BarTab doesn't do what you expected. BarTab works well for thousands of users who use tabs extensively. There are well-written reports of its memory conserving abilities. But if what you're looking for is a way to make your 10 tabs consume less memory or if you think that 100 MB is too much for a browser to consume, then BarTab probably isn't what you want.

6. BarTab is awesome! Why won't you install a Donate button on AMO?

Firstly I don't want people to get the impression that BarTab is shareware or something of similar dubious nature. Secondly, taking money may also create the impression that I'm making some sort of commitment to the software. In practice that's of course true -- I take BarTab very seriously. But I still don't want to feel obliged because people have donated money. If you feel the need to show your appreciation, write me an email, buy me a beer or just spread the word about BarTab.