I’m one of those people who loads up Firefox with umpteen extensions, all of which slow down my browser, and yet all of which seem utterly indispensable the second they’re installed. A few months ago I wrote about the extensions I installed to make Firefox more like Chrome (only in the good aspects, of course) but just in recent days, I think I’ve found my favourite extension. Ever.

It’s Tree Style Tab. Basically, it displays the tabs I have open in a sidebar down the side of the screen, rather than in the conventional bar across the top. Furthermore, it allows tabs to be children of other tabs.

I’m one of those people who always has plenty of tabs open. My “home page” is actually five pages. One of those pages is Google Reader, from which I go on to open plenty of blog posts and news items to keep myself up to date. Another site that is almost constantly open (although it’s not one of my home pages) is Twitter, from which I inevitably click on plenty more news items and blog posts.

If the tabs are all across the top of the screen, that limits my ability to multitask really badly. I can’t open ten items from Google Reader then go and explore the links that have just been posted on Twitter, or else the tabs bar will start scrolling sideways. I hate it when the tab bar starts scrolling horizontally. Also, before it even gets to that point, the tabs get so small that I can’t read what’s on that page any more.

Enter Tree Style Tab. With its vertical tab list, I can read just as much of any page’s title no matter how many tabs I have open.

I am able to have a lot more tabs open — at this moment I have 21 open, and there’s still room for another five or six first-level tabs. If I collapsed all the Google Reader tabs, you could make that room for 15 more.

It’s more effective use of “screen real estate”. My laptop’s screen resolution is 1280x800, which is fine, except that any website that actually made use of all 1280 pixels of horizontal width would drive me mental. Lines of text can only be so long before they get awkward to read, you know. By moving the tabs to the side, that liberates at least 25px of vertical space, in return for 150px of horizontal space I don’t use anyway.

Okay, the main value of that is when I visit sites that don’t set max-widths. WHY SITES DON’T DO THIS, I DON’T KNOW. But for instance, my entry-writing screen in Chyrp? The textarea is as wide as the window, less ~80px of margin either side. 1120px of horizontal space is too wide, dammit. With Tree Style Tab that becomes 950px wide or so, which is just that much more bearable.

Anyway, that’s enough gushing from me! What tricks or extensions do you use to make your browser more useful?