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I updated the compatibility of Colorfultabs beta to work with Firefox 3 beta5 and pre1. You can download the extension from the software section. Currently I'm not able to offer updates as I lost some data migrating to Binary Turf. However you can manually install it. Hopefully this will be fixed in the future. Hopefully I was able to find the relevant files from my backups (backups really help — like one in a million times :). So now you will automatically be offered this new update.
This update does not contain any major feature enhancements. It will be some time that the feature set of this beta release matches that of the stable release. Give it a try and provide me your feedback.
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{ 75 comments }
I'm watiting for a long time~
Thanks the released version for Firefox 3 b5.
It would be really cool if the add-on would allow me to right-click on any tab and select reset all colors to automatically redo the colors (only when set to randomize colors).
I know yo have worked hard on this so kudos. The old version used to give me errors for some reason? I had to uninstall and doing without has been a bummer, thanks it's great!
# Beautiful colours - A beautiful in-built colour palette.
Your spelling(see below) jumps from COLOUR to COLOR - I wonder why.
Maylo
# Unique Colours - Colour each tab with a different colour for easy differentiation.
# Colours by site domain - Colour each tab depending on its server/domain for identifying the website.
# Custom tab colour - Give your tabs a colour of your choice.
# Enhanced tab highlighting - Fade the background tabs to identify the currently selected tab
# Easy Options - Quick tab-context-menu for ease of access to the options.
# Colors each tab using pre selected colors in a definite order starting from the left.
# Colors each tab using a unique and randomly generated color.
# Colors each tab using a unique color depending on the site domain using a formula.
# Allows user to chose colors.
Presently the tab's text fades with the background color. Would be great to keep the text its original intensity - for easier identification.
Maylo: I'm still trying to get used to American English
Tom: this is the way CSS works. The opacity prperty applies to all the child elements. Thus if I fade the tab, all child elements get faded though their opacity is still 1. It's like trying to brighten one area on the television set.
But why is it necessary to use opacity?
Why not just change the color a bit?
Change color of what? Tab-text or the tab itself? What's the point of having ColorfulTabs if the color can't stick to a tab?
I'm just exploring options here. Opacity is the transparency of the tab. The purpose is to highlight the active tab. That way the colors remain the same but the background tabs take a back seat. Can you please explain?
Excellent!! Thank you for a superb addon. Im using it with FF V3,B5. It works!
Any chance that colouring tab by IP is a feature that might be added in the future? I think this would be really handy to quickly distinguish between sites on testing and live servers.
Integrating domain name resolution into ColorfulTabs may be feasible. How will this help? Can you please describe?
Excellent
I develop websites as my job, in the process the same site may be deployed to various different staging servers before it goes live. Colouring by IP instead of domain would presumably colour all sites off a particular machine one colour allowing me to quickly know what I have open.
Currently I can tell what site I have open by reading the title of the tab, but without swapping to it I can't see the url. Although the current method of colouring works (in that the domain for the testing site is different from the live) it doesn't visually group all testing sites using the same colour. Hard to explain, basically it would be nice to have all my testing sites green and my live sites red (colours were examples only, don't really mind what the colour is)
The only thing I'm not sure of is how this will effect me browsing the rest of the internet as I don't really have much use for this feature on sites hosted on servers that aren't under my control. Idealy i would like to be able to filter it so the colouring only happened for site on certain servers, but that's a hell of alot more work then just colouring by ip i would imagine.
Excellent! I highly recommend it. Thank you.
Great work… I love it. Thanks..
On FF3/linux is still not working!
The FF2 version works fine… what happened???
Simple, nice, colorfull;
…just like my daughters
anybody here?
Please tell us if you will like to release a 3.0 version which works on all platforms.
Thanks.
Hi Rob,
There still is not enough feedback about what platforms colorfultabs is broken on. Most of the time the feedback isn't relevant as there is no information about the other addons installed (which may have potential conflicts). I think I will call a poll on this today. Thanks for bringing this up.
Great add-on!
thx a lot…
It does NOT work on Ubuntu Hardy with Firefox beta 5. The plugin installs correctly, context menu is OK, but tabs are not coloured (look exactly like they looked before). Of all the plugins I have that might cause interference, TabMixPlus looks like the only reasonable suspect.
…and it does not work even with TabMixPlus disabled… I miss this plugin very much
de mayo grade Cinco de Cinco mayo celebrate
This is a really great add-on for Firefox and it is great to see that you have added a version for Flock as well.
I have a feature request for the Mac version, well really it is a reversion to an intermediate style choice that I would like to see as an option for displaying the colors. In one of the previous releases, for b3 I think, the color for each tab was a small clean rectangle attached to the bottom of the tab. I thought this was a very cool idea and appreciate it much, much more than the more general color scheme that that is being applied in the version for b5 - p1.
How hard would it be to make this an option in future versions of the extension?
Thanks for a great product,
Paul
Paul: I give a considerable time to suggestions. But can't get it from your comment. Please email me at varun21@gmail.com
de Cinco pictures mayo: English is not my mother tongue but that's the only other language I can understand
How do I get it to work? I have a Mac and Firefox/3.0b5. I've downloaded it to my desktop. I've tried to put it in "applications" and everywhere else. I'm lost.
NnekaBaby : Just drag and drop it over the Firefox window.
Thanks!
it doesnt work on ubuntu hardy, hope you will fix that soon, i miss this plugin
Will you be fixing this for the RC1 (and Final for that matter)? I've managed to install this by forcing it to run (the 3.0pre1 version), but I'm sure people would like to install this extension a bit easier way. Keep up the good work, I can't live without colorfultabs.
Was work good on Firefox 3 beta 5, but in RC1 it doen't colorise tabs.
Waiting for new version!!
Colorful tabs 2.0.10 with compatible mode works good on Firefox 3 RC1 (colorize the tabs), but 3pre1 doesn't colorize!
I couldn't get the B5/PRE1 version of Colorful Tabs to install in the Preview Release. The install.rdf file has a max FF version of 3.0pre1. However, the Preview Release is listed as 3.0 only, if you view Help | About. If you modify the install.rdf file to have a max value of 3.0, it will install.
I can't install it on RC1… i drag and drop the file into Firefox and sends a "no compatible with.." error.
Any ideas? i really miss this plugin.
I also can't install on RC1. I get the same "not compatible with" error if I drag and drop or just try the click to install.
PS - This is on WinXP.
Can't install on FF pre-release. FF says not compatible.
works great with rc1. use the nightly tester tools 2.0.2 addon!
Still not working on linux (ubuntu 8.04, firefox 3 b5). I can choose the fading level, but no colors!
I confirm that it still doesn't work on Ubuntu (8.04, Firefox 3 RC1). Creating a new profile didn't help, either.
Installs and appears to work (right click on tab set color, etc), but does not change the color of the tab in FF 3.0b5 on Ubuntu
This is the error of FF3/linux after opening firefox and two tabs:
ColorfulTabs Log: clrtabsInit
ColorfulTabs Log: setCtPref
colorfultabs log: clrprefs- 95 30 78 68
name: ColorfulTabs
version: 3.0 RC1
cl: chkRestore
ColorfulTabs Log:
ColorfulTabs Log: scheme value: random
cl: setColor hsl(297,46%,69%)
cl: fadeAllTabs
ColorfulTabs Log: initTabcontext true
appending
ctlog: context menu is set*** e = [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE) [nsIJSCID.getService]" nsresult: "0×80570016 (NS_ERROR_XPC_GS_RETURNED_FAILURE)" location: "JS frame :: chrome://browser/content/utilityOverlay.js :: getShellService :: line 307" data: no]
ColorfulTabs Log: calcTabClr
Tab readonly?
cl: setColor hsl(13,66%,68%)
cl: fadeAllTabs
30 95 68 78
cl: fadeAllTabs
ColorfulTabs Log: calcTabClr
Tab readonly?
cl: setColor hsl(107,37%,74%)
cl: fadeAllTabs
30 95 68 78
cl: fadeAllTabs
Oh! Great job!
Very interesting and actual post.
I add your interesting blog in my Netvibes page!
Thank You!! I love this.
I would like to be able to click a second time on a tab and have the prior tab return to view, like you can do with a minimized window on the Windows taskbar. Being able to toggle between tabs in this way would be very useful.
Yes , thanks a lot!
Thanks for the FF3 version, its nice to have ColorfulTabs again
Hi,
I love this on my PC but on my Mac (OS X) - it doesn't look so good. It doesn't colour the tabs properly.
With Firefox 3, Colorful tabs 3.1; if I change the default color of a tab, the setting is not saved and the color reverts to the default when Firefox is restarted.
Excelente!! Gracias!
Still can not get tab colors to change on Firefox 3 on Win xp home. Other features (i.e. fade, background image) work. It does work on my laptop and my husband's computer also running win xp home. What can be the problem? Please help, I miss the color.
Hej, thanks for this - it's really helpful. I have a request, although I'm not sure if it's possible to realize.
Could you add an option to generate the color not by URL but by dominant colors of the website? Maybe it's possible to analyse the html to extract background colors?
Thanks
I know you prefer comments to e-mail, but it's not easy to find an appropriate place to comment!
This extension is currently making the job of comparing Javascript between multiple wikis *much* easier, but I've found a couple of sites seem to have settled on the same colour. Is it possible to reset or choose the colour for a site? Where is this info stored?
(The culprits are "en.wikipedia.org" and "en.wiktionary.org".)
Currently it is possible to set the color for a tab and reset it.
The colors (hue) is calculated by an SHA256 algorithm of the URL while saturation and luminance are fixed (to control the overall pleasant-ness of the generated colours).
But the colour is only set for one tab and not saved for the site, right? Because the algorithm recalculates the colour the next time you visit the site?
It's strange that the colours are so similar for the English sites but radically different for the Irish ones…
en.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 213, 227)
en.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 215, 227)
ga.wiktionary.org rgb(198, 227, 144)
ga.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 147, 227)
fr.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 205)
fr.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 213, 144)
de.wiktionary.org rgb(227, 179, 144)
de.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 219, 144)
nl.wiktionary.org rgb(227, 169, 144)
nl.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 227, 212)
es.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 194)
es.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 227, 153)
it.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 144)
it.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 191, 144)
The Spanish ones are also very similar but you can tell them apart.
As it is the algorithm probably works fine for most users most of the time, but maybe it could do with some tweaking. Perhaps some kind of (configurable?) minimum difference between colours for open tabs, though this might lead to more colour collisions and isn't as elegant. Or the other option would be to allow the user to choose a colour for a particular site. That would be more work of course.
(reformatted)
en.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 213, 227) hue:127
en.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 215, 227) hue:126
ga.wiktionary.org rgb(198, 227, 144) hue:54
ga.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 147, 227) hue:159
fr.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 205) hue:109
fr.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 213, 144) hue:33
de.wiktionary.org rgb(227, 179, 144) hue:17
de.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 219, 144) hue:36
nl.wiktionary.org rgb(227, 169, 144) hue:12
nl.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 227, 212) hue:113
es.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 194) hue:104
es.wikipedia.org rgb(144, 227, 153) hue:84
it.wiktionary.org rgb(144, 227, 144) hue:80
it.wikipedia.org rgb(227, 191, 144) hue:23
… and each time you visit the site, the domain remains the same and therefore the color remains the same.
In your case you want to use the "random color" setting. The colors have got nothing to do with Italian, English or Hindi for that matter
Well…the colours are connected to the language since the domain name starts with the language code.
Are you saying that random will assign the same colour to the same site?
Because that is the behaviour I need. I need to distinguish multiple tabs from these sites from their corresponding pages on other sites.
My only complaint is that the colours for the English sites (i.e. en.wiktionary.org and en.wikipedia.org) are too similar.
that's another way of looking at it but it is very misleading to think of it that way. Think of it as the domains color.
The random setting will not assign the color to the site based on its domain name. it will generate a unique color every time you open a site. All your questions are answered in ColorfulTabs documentation and help at http://binaryturf.com/software/colorfultabs-for-firefox/colorfultabs-documentation-and-help/ You may want to go through it.
If that page had answered my questions I'd have never come here!
The only point I've been trying to make is that sometimes the colours are just too similar when assigned by the algorithm.
It should. I invested a lot of effort to document this information so let's go through it together. Refer to the information about preferences at http://binaryturf.com/software/colorfultabs-for-firefox/colorfultabs-documentation-and-help/#3
Under the third bullet it mentions "Colors tabs from a uniquely and randomly generated color." Since it does not mention that the color is calculated by the domain/url this means the color is totally random.
The fourth bullet mentions the use of the domain in calculating the color. If the domains are too similar the colors will be similar.
Each setting of color generation uses a different algorithm. There are people who prefer selected colors in a sequence, totally random colors and colors based on the domain. Take your pick
Actually, you brought up the random option. I've only ever wanted one colour per site.
The problem is that a differences that appears equivalent to a human - the difference between en.wiktionary.org & en.wikipedia.org vs. the difference between ga.wiktionary.org & ga.wikipedia.org - are not equivalent differences to ColorfulTabs. The first two differ in hue by 1, the second two by 105!
I'm merely suggesting this as something that might be worth thinking about since it's contrary to what a user would expect.
If you don't have the time or inclination to give it much thought, that's perfectly fine too.
It's fair to expect a software to live upto expectations. However it's not fair to expect technology to live upto expectations.
I do not wish to change the algorithm due to several factors. Your point has been taken. And to rephrase your issue; currently we are only calculating the hue, the luminance and saturation remain the same. This limits us to 360 different colors. But there are more than 360 sites and essentially not enough colors to paint them.
There's some other consideration also. There's no algorithm or artificial intelligence that can differentiate between pleasant and unpleasant colors. But with ColorfulTabs everything changes. The pastel colors that show up when 20-30 tabs are open still play soft on the eyes and appear pleasing. Hoever if we were to use black brown etc… the thing would look ugly.
I've acted in favour of the overall pleasantness of the interface. There are rare cases of people opening 360 tabs and different sites into everyone. But yes, once in a while we do run into issues where in colors are very similiar.
At your request I will further play around and see if we can also vary the saturation and luminance by the domain. If it still comes out to be pleasing, we are good to go. Essentially it's not about time or inclination. It's just that the phenomenon is comparatively rare and not enough or a botheration to look for alternatives. But let me work on it further.
Just now installed ColorfulTabs and it's fantastic! Great idea, great execution, instantly useful.
One thing: When I press the "Get background images" link, I'm getting a 404 error.
It's not a big dieal since odds are I wouldn't have been using the background images feature anyway. I just thought it would be fun to try it out.
Wonderful idea, especially having colour related to URL, but is it not possible for me to choose the colour I want for a specific domain and then have that same colour appear everytime I go to that domain? At the moment it seems that the colour for a URL is chosen by the program and not by the user.
Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please…
More "Preset Domain Colors"!
More More More More More.
At least a dozen, maybe two dozen … or three … or … !
Just More More More More More.
I love this Extension, and it would be so perfect for me if I could just get more than five Preset Domain Colors.
Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please, Please…
Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!
What a comment
Maybe you could collaberate with the TabBrowserPreferences guy,Bradley Chapman,
https://addons.update.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/158?application=firefox&id=158&vid=1345
or at least help him make his app usable in FF3. It's one of the best.
This may have nothing to do with you, but do you perhaps know how to download a Firefox AddOn in FF3 without installing? I would like everyone on my network to be able to install without every user downloading separately.
Would it be possible to add an option to always have the same colour for the active tab? I would find this really useful.
Thanks
WTF is Flock?
Ewald
I'm not sure if your query was directed to me. In case it was, here's a link on how to download and enable older extensions on FF3:
http://www.dailygyan.com/2008/05/how-to-download-firefox-2-extensions.html
It's way over my head. If anyone figures out a way to make it work, please let me know.
I answered Ewald directly. He wanted to deploy the extension to multiple computers.
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