-Mozilla drop in to our hands, the hot, hot, hot 4th Beta for Firefox 4 and there's a nifty new stuff to check out.
The big new feature is a new visual tool for managing your tabs.
Sexy stuff, right?
Hi!
I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET download.com.
And in this how-to, I'll show you the ins and outs of Firefox's new tab managing feature, Panorama.
Firefox fans will know the feature by its original name, Tab Candy but that lasted for only about 5 minutes.
Panorama is fairly easy to use.
When you install Firefox 4 Beta 4, you'll now see 2 buttons on the top right corner instead of 1.
The one that reads, Group Your Tabs, will open with all your tabs in one group.
You can also open Panorama with the Control Spacebar hot key combo on Windows or the Option Spacebar combo on Mac.
If you don't see the button, you might need to customize your toolbar and restore to default set.
Sucks, but that's the way it is.
Using Panorama is not hard but it does have a small learning curve decline.
To create a second group, click and hold on any tab and drag it to the open space.
Then, as you drag tabs on top of it, the group will expand to accommodate them.
You can resize the group, rename it, open a new tab, and preview the tabs in the group.
Clicking on a group will hide, not close your other tabs to make it easier to focus on the tabs at hand.
They're also hidden when using control tab to cycle between tabs.
However, you're required to jump back into Panorama to see the rest.
Panorama generally works well although there are some oddities.
If you use more than one window, each window gets its own Panorama.
It'd be nice to have a unified Panorama so you can move tabs between them.
Also, the aforementioned tabs cycling can be a bit buggy,
and sometimes it will take you through your groups instead of staying focus in one group.
Also, it'd be nice to see app tabs called out in their own group by default but that doesn't happen.
It's completely reasonable to expect Mozilla to have fixed these bugs before Firefox 4 leaves Beta.
Panorama is a good start for helping Firefox tame your unruly collection of 6 dozen tabs.
Remember folks, it's okay to not have the entire web open at once.
For CNET, I'm Seth Rosenblatt.
