Faviconize Works Again!
I do the majority of my work on my trusty IBM Thinkpad T30. Last week I installed FireFox 3 because I was looking forward to fewer memory leaks and a better looking interface (the Ubuntu/FF relationship produced some super-ugly forms, and even the available hacks from the Ubuntu community didn’t do very much to improve the situation).
However, I discovered once it was installed that ‘Faviconize‘ hadn’t been upgraded to FF3 compatibility yet. This is one of those times when you say to yourself, “It’ll be ok, it’s just a little plugin…” and then realize every day that you miss it dearly.
For those not in the know, Faviconize is a plugin for FF that allows you to shorten the tabs in your browser down to just their favicon, instead of having the full title. When you work on a non-design-grade laptop (read: 12.1″ screen) like I do, it gets very frustrating very quickly to have to scroll back and forth to find your tabs. Since I always have at least three standard tabs open: Pandora, Google Apps Mail, and Google Apps Calendar, I use Faviconize to reduce them to the smaller tab size in order to keep my “web-desktop” uncluttered.
(A quick sidenote to web designers: Pandora, GMail, and GCal have all gone the extra mile and made some nice-looking, easily recognized Favicons. This is a major point of usability for bookmarks, tabs, toolbars, etc. I’m not saying they’re successful because they have good favicons, but it certainly doesn’t hurt, so make one!)
It was amazing how much productivity (I felt like) I lost due to have to scroll around and constantly reorganize tabs.
But I was happy to discover this morning that Faviconize now works with FF3. I’m just not sure why the FF team doesn’t include this feature in their software by default. This is one of those things that should be an easy add-on, and wouldn’t be intrusive to those who don’t use it.
Anyway, it’s back and I’m happy about it.