The more open windows or tabs you have, the harder it is to switch between them. Windows 7 offers an elegant solution to the problem via its Aero Peek feature – roll a mouse over an open program icon in the Taskbar and it’ll pop up a preview tab (or series of tabs if more than one window is open) helping you identify which window to switch to.

If you’re the kind of person who regularly runs Firefox with multiple tabs open, you might appreciate a similar preview feature being made available to your browser too. Tab Scope is that add-on – once installed, simply roll your mouse over a tab for a pop-up preview of that window’s content. Need more detail? Just right-click, and the preview doubles in size.

Place the mouse at the top of the preview, and you’ll see a bar appear with a number of options, letting you navigate and refresh the tab content without switching to it. You can also create an App Tab or set up tab groupings directly from here too.

Like all good extensions, you can fine-tune Tab Scope from the add-ons window. Click Options and you can choose where the pop-up preview appears (by default it’s beneath the tab, but you can place it above or to either side of it instead), plus you can adjust the preview size, zoom ratio and speed at which the window appears and zooms in. You can also disable the pop-up preview for the currently selected tab from here. Switch to the Advanced section and you can control the appearance of the toolbar, plus set default actions for when you click on the popup.

The add-on is written with Windows users in mind – it’ll work on other platforms, but the extension looks best on the Windows platform.

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