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philikon / BarTab

Firefox add-on: Drink now, pay later: put your tabs on your bar tab!
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/67651/
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TabScope shows empty page #77

Open johnyept opened 13 years ago

johnyept commented 13 years ago

Hi.

TabScope is a Firefox addon that shows a thumbnail preview when the mouse over a Tab, much like Thumbnail Previews on Windows Vista Taskbar, but we can actually scroll and click inside the preview like a normal page. The problem is that the preview is empty when the Tab is unloaded (obvious).

Could an unloaded page be replaced by a snapshot of the same page (JPG, PNG, etc) so we can look at the page without actually loading it? I think that would involve saving a snapshot to some kind of cache whenever a page is unloaded or whenever Firefox is closed.

That would also make TabScope work with BarTab (minus the "click through the preview" thingy, who uses that anyway?).

Thanks for reading.

Drugoy commented 13 years ago

Where do you offer to take that snapshot from if the site hasn't been opened by the browser? How can the browser get to know what's on that site without loading it?

johnyept commented 13 years ago

That is why i mentioned an option to replace the unloaded page with an image (JPG, PNG, etc). For example, before unloading a page, BarTab could save it to an image, and put it in the background of the empty tab. That way the page would not be loaded but visible/readable, and pressing F5 would load/update it. What do you think?

johnyept commented 13 years ago

Oh, now i see what you were aiming at... How can BarTab save an image of an unloaded tab? Easy: save it before he unloads it. When you first install BarTab, the tabs aren't unloaded. And anyway, there could be a menu option to "snapshot tabs", AKA load, snapshot, unload. Yet i don't know if adding an image to an empty/unloaded tab is even possible, of course this is just an idea.

Drugoy commented 13 years ago

I think it's not worth that. The profit is small: the use of thumbnail image is not big, but coding that feature will take much time and using this feature will also require some time just to load, snapshot, store thumbnail, unload. I suggest to ignore or at least postpone this request, until features/bugs of higher priority get released/fixed.

johnyept commented 13 years ago

The idea is not to load, snapshot and unload every time firefox is opened, but rather a one time event, so when firefox is closed and reopened, all tabs (except for the active one) are unloaded but with a picture (saved when last unloaded) instead of a page in every tab.

This is not a high priority request as obvious, but if possible i would love this feature in a future version ;)