Mozilla has launched support for Tab Previews in Firefox Nightly officially. Firefox displays a thumbnail image of the open webpage on hover once the feature is enabled.
Current versions of Firefox display just the title of the website on hover. Firefox shows just the first few characters of a title on the tab itself by default.
While the title is sufficient for some users, others may prefer to see a preview of the actual web content. This may help identify the right webpage and thus tab when switching tabs in Firefox.
Once enabled, Firefox shows a preview of the webpage on hover.
Firefox users who run the Nightly version may enable Tab Previews in the following way:
- Load about:config in the Firefox address bar.
- Click on Accept the Risk and Continue.
- Search for browser.tabs.cardPreview
- Double-click on browser.tabs.cardPreview.enabled to set the value to True, , if it is not true already.
- Double-click on browser.tabs.cardPreview.showThumbnails to set the value to True, if it is not true already.
- Restart Firefox.
You should get previews now when you hover over a loaded tab in the browser.
Disable tab previews: if you do not like tab previews, you can disable them by setting browser.tabs.cardPreview.enabled to False.
A third preference determines how fast or slow previews are shown. This is browser.tabs.cardPreview.delayMs, which you may also change on about:config. The value is in milliseconds. Reduce the number and previews are shown quicker, or increase it, to get more hover time before tab previews are shown.
Bonus tip: set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to True to show up to 20 thumbnail images of open webpages in Firefox when hovering over the Firefox icon on the taskbar of the operating system. You can change that number by modifying browser.taskbar.previews.max on about:config.
Closing Words
Mozilla will enable Tab Previews in Firefox by default in the future. Good news is that users can disable the feature, if they have no use for it. Will take months before the feature lands in Firefox Stable.
Will you keep tab previews enabled or are you using them already in another browser?
What’s the difference between what you wrote about vs the Setting in Firefox Beta that we’ve had for a few versions now that says “Show an image preview when you hover on a tab”?
Good question. I do not really know. Mozilla announced Tab Previews recently on the weekly Nightly blog: https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/02/06/a-preview-of-tab-previews-these-weeks-in-firefox-issue-153/