I remember when I used Mac OS X more than Linux and Safari more than Firefox, Chrome or Vivaldi. There was one thing I liked, and it was the ability to preview a link without fully entering the page. It is possible to do this with extensions like Link Previewer in Firefox or Hover in Chromium, but Safari does it better. Something similar is available in some browsers, but with tabs: when we hover over it we can see a card of what's on it, and Firefox Nightly has begun to experiment with this possibility.
You already know what Firefox Nightly is, a version of the red panda browser that in this case is blue and is two months ahead. It is test bench number 1, with 2 being the beta or developer version. There are many features that are tested here and do not make it to the stable version, but the tab preview It is something that we believe will come. If you are wondering how you can try it, we explain it here, but we anticipate that you cannot do it in your current browser.
How to Test Firefox Nightly Tab Preview
As explained in the Mozilla blog, the function has arrived, but it is disabled by default. To activate it, first of all you have to be in Firefox Nightly. Binaries can be downloaded from this link, on systems like Ubuntu it can be downloaded from the Mozilla repository and in Arch-based distributions it is available in AUR.
Once Nightly is installed, we start it. Then you have to enter about: config in the URL bar, accept the warning that we have entered the dangerous zone if we had not entered before and had asked not to leave again, search browser.tabs.cardPreview.
The result will be like what the header image shows. Hovering over a tab will reveal a card with what appears to be the title of the HTML, the URL address and under a partial screenshot. If anyone is wondering, these types of features are not designed to interact with what they display; You cannot move content as the previously mentioned Hover extension allows. If we move the cursor the card will disappear. It is also not possible, at least for the moment – and we believe it will never be – to change the size or design of the card. Without a doubt it can be done, but by hacking/modifying the original design, for which there are no instructions or information provided.
Undo the changes
If we don't like how it looks, undo changes It is achieved the same way we did them, but clicking on the switch will change to "false" and we will no longer see the cards. The curved arrow indicating that we made changes will disappear and there is no need to reboot to get back to normal.
It should be noted that Firefox Nightly can coexist with the stable version and the beta on the same computer without any problem. Since a version whose number is around 70, if I remember correctly, Firefox runs in its own profile, and does not detect that they are the same application. If we want to restart the browser, whatever version of Firefox it is, we can restore the profile from about: profiles. Another option that Linux users have is to show the hidden files in our file manager, go to our personal folder and delete the .mozilla folder.
Firefox Nightly is now in the version 124, which will arrive on the stable channel in March. Whether it includes this feature or not is something we will find out next month. If they decide to implement it, the steps to follow in these cases are to add the function and leave it disabled to activate it in a future release.