Mastering the Tab Group Editor
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- Revision id: 31487
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- Creator: zipguy
- Comment: Minor changes here and there
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Mastering the Tab Group Editor
Table of Contents
Tab Group Editor
You can get familiar with the Tab Group Editor over at Use Tab Groups to organize a lot of tabs. It is written quite well, but it is a little too concentrated So you should read it slowly, or over again.
If you have visited it then, and have got a little familiar with the editor, there are a few more surprises in the editor. If you haven't used the task group editor much, don't worry about it.
Lets just call it editor. We'll try to get you intimate with the advanced features of the editor. You may have tried it before but if you open it now you may see this
What? My little screens went to a Stack!
Ah yes... You've encountered a "enhanced feature" of the Editor. Obviously if you had a lot of screens in your group, Mozilla would have to represent it as a Stack. There are too many screens to represent in "tiles",
What can you do with a stack? There a couple of ways to deal with it. Most people want it back to what we call tiles.
Resize the Stack's Group
What you might try to do is grab it by the right-hand corner and expand it's size a little bit
At first it seems like a success, because you can see the nice tiles back again But what happened is you've entered into what's known as Overlap Mode
It can go one of two ways. Either the editor has enough room to move over the one you're overlaping, or it might have to turn it into another stack. In either case, you've got at least one stack back to tiles, but you might have swapped the stack into another group.
So what you need is more room around your group. You'll need that room to increase the size of the group that was (or is) a stack. That is the best way to avoid Overlap Mode.
What's Overlapmap Mode?
Let's explain Overlap Mode a little bit. Think of it a blocks of different sizes (all rectangular) that may be moved, or resized. Furthermore, lets imagine they are made of rubber. So what happens when you get into Overlap Mode, by increasing the size so much that the other block, next to it, has to move or resize. If the other block resizes, it may have to get smaller (the one that you're overlapping) which may force it into a stack. So let's look at what happened. We dragged the box larger, got into Overlap Mode, and made the other box a little bit too small. That's what forced into becoming a stack.
Look back at the screen above. See what's causing our problem? It's the group called "Main" which is also a stack. Let's move it. It has handles on both sides and the bottom (not the top) near the edge of the group. So we can drag it down
and to the left
That's good. Now you can resize the "Mozilla" group, or whatever your group is named,
and turn it back into tiles. The Editor assumes you know what you're doing, so just be a little careful, until you've got the hang of it.
The other choice is just to ...
Treat it as a Stack
What you can do with a stack is use the tiny little magnifying glass to find any screen in any group. It's been documented in Use Tab Groups to organize a lot of tabs under How do I search through my tabs?.
Also what you can do is click on the little icon under the stack
and get a preview of all the pages in the group. Then you can click on a page
and go back to view it in Firefox.
Note that you can also click back to anywhere, by clicking in the blue (which borders the black), within the preview, and go back to the stack, inside the editor.
Tile Resizing
Also, notice that the tiles resize automatically.
How does it do that? It's kind of simple, based on how many tiles are in the group and how much screen real estate it has to use.
One last but important thing to mention to you...
Don't try the close button
There is a close button on each group. If you clicked it like this
then you'd see this
BE VERY CAREFULL! If you close that group then you're closing that entire group of pages. They are GONE, from your browser.
Thankfully you can click on the "Undo Close Group"
and you're back to the stack, or the group of tiles.