Liquid Tabs

What is Liquid Tabs?

Liquid Tabs is a Firefox extension that animates the opening and closing of tabs, inspired by similar features coming to Firefox 4.

Liquid Tabs is the continuation of the “Smoothly Close Tabs” extension.  By popular request, the ability to animate opening tabs was added, and the extension was given  a more appropriate name.

Install

Please visit Addons.Mozilla.Org to install.

What’s new in Version 1.3.1?

• Updated settings window
  • Instead of vague sliders, you can use textboxes to directly specify the time  (in milliseconds) for tabs to open or close.
  • Similarly, replaced the frame rate (FPS) slider with a textbox.  Also added the word “maximum” because there is too much going on in Firefox during page open/close (especially with several other extensions loaded) to guarantee a minimum frame rate.
• bugfix:  Settings would be zeroed out when re-opening the settings window under Linux.
• bugfix: “High Priority” setting was not loaded when the browser loaded.

Version 1.3.0

• Renamed to Liquid Tabs to reflect new and future functionality.
• Nearly complete rewrite of the animation logic.  The new logic allows skipping of animation frames to complete the sequence in a consistent amount of time.
• Added ability to animate opening tabs.
• Separate animation speed and fading options for opening and closing tabs.

What’s Next?

It would be nice to have the tabs slide around as you drag a tab into a new position in the tab bar.  However, I’m not sure it can be done, and Firefox 4, the inspiration for this extension is closer than you think.