Firefox’s tabs are normally an easy and convenient way to work online, neatly organising your open sites into separate, isolated views.

There may still be times when you need to view two or more tabs at the same time, though – and that’s where Tile Tabs can help, instantly organising your chosen Firefox tabs into a single tiled window.

The extension is absolutely packed with commands, functions, options and settings, and it can seem intimidating at first. Fortunately its core features are straightforward enough. Open three or four tabs, click Tile > New Layout > All Tabs – Horizontal, and you’ll see all your current tabs tiled one above the other.

This isn’t just some static view of your tabs. Splitter bars enable you to resize your tiles as required. And each tile is effectively a separate browser, just as before, so you can click links and work as normal in one tile, while the others remain visible.

Tile Tabs automatically tiles your chosen tabs, then you can resize each one as required

Alternatively, if these tiles are displaying related content, you might press F8 (or click Tile > Sync Scroll) to link them all together. Now scroll one tab and the others scroll, too: very convenient.

For this first example we’ve tiled all our tabs, which is quite drastic: every tab displays the tiled view. A simpler, less intrusive alternative would be to click Tile > Tile New Tab > Below. This splits your current tab into two tiles, with the current page at the top, your “new tab” page below, while all other tabs remain untouched.

Setting up the ideal tile layout can take a while, but your work can be saved for easy recall later. Tiles can be manipulated in various ways – added, removed, collapsed, expanded – and with 70+ settings available, there’s plenty of scope for configuring Tile Tabs to suit your needs.

But if you don’t want to go that far, just a simple layout change may be useful occasionally. And whatever you do is easily reversed: press F12, or click Tile > Close Layout (or Close All Layouts if you’ve been busy), your tiles are instantly closed, and every open tab is restored to its original state.