FabTabs

Intelligently colored tabs

I'm a big fan of making Firefox look as pretty as possible, so when I realized that I could color my tabs, I grabbed the opportunity with both hands. After a while, however, I began to lament the fact that the tab color wasn't always what I would choose myself, as it sometimes clashed with the website I was viewing.

FabTabs aims to put an end to this by applying intelligent colors to your tabs. Instead of assigning tones arbitrarily, this Firefox add-on takes a brief screenshot of the page you are viewing, decides on the predominant color and colors your tabs accordingly. It even has an options window where you can toggle the intensity of the color and specifications of the screenshot, among other tweaks.

In theory, FabTabs is an excellent idea, but in practice, I wasn't so impressed. Maybe I could play around with the settings to get a better result, but I found the tab colors to be similar to each other and not always representative of the whole window. The "Recolor Tab" option didn't work, and sometimes the color of the tab bore no relation to the main color of the page I was viewing. For example, I wanted a green tab to make the screenshots more interesting, so searched for "green" on Flickr. Even though I got a page absolutely full of green images, the FabTabs tab remained white, which puzzled me. Maybe others will have better luck with this add-on, but I was unimpressed.

Great idea in theory, but in practice FabTabs didn't deliver.

Changes

• Inactive tabs now have a softer color so the active tab is more exposed Added ru, sr and sv-SE translations Cleaned up and rewritten partially to support Firefox 4. This version no longer supports Firefox versions older than 4 because too much had to be changed