Firefox has released the Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for developer preview. It Visually doesn’t feature any changes from version 3.5. But it features integration with Windows 7 Taskbar and also Windows 7 Style switching of tabs using Ctrl + Tab. Yes it’s able to display the tabs preview.

Download it here.

(Click on this, if you need a Direct link to Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 English for Windows)

Windows 7 Like Tab Preview

Firefox 3.6 ca now display tab previews like Windows 7(the very same way of Alt+Tab in Windows 7).

This feature is disabled by default in the beta version.

type about:config in your address bar and on the appearing page, search for browser.ctrlTabPreviews. Set this as true.

OK now you’re done. Start Exploring

You can select the required tabs using mouse as well by holiding down the Ctrl+Tab key.

What if you’ve too may tabs? Ctrl + Shift + Tab will show up all tabs in the firefox window. Alternatively you can do this by holding down Ctrl + Tab and Click on “Show All Tabs” displayed in the very same windows

This preview window display features a search box where you can quickly search for the required tab if too many tabs are open. As this Shift key assigned with Ctrl+Tab to show up whole tabs, I’m sadly missing shortcut I previously used to traverse back in order.

You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

Windows 7 Taskbar Integration

On hovering the taskbar icon of firefox, you can see the preview of tabs in the aero peek window. To enjoy this feature you will have to enable aero theme in you Windows 7.

On hovering the mouse over the windows displayed in the peek view, surely you can peek to see the window. It’s the real Windows 7 peek feature. You can also close the tabs if necessary in this view.

If you’ve too many tabs open, then it will be displayed as stacked list as your seeing above.

Cool eh! This is a quick post on my first look, if you find something really cool, please do share with me in twitter, facebook, or as a comment in this blog.

It will be very nice if we can temporarily removing the update from the friends. So that I can check each and every updates in ease, on removing seen entries, the next entry should come up. Tweetdeck has a feature like clear seen tweets. This something similar to that. Without deleting the facebook entry, temporarily removing the entries. Something like below, it’d be nice if we put a close button like this per entry to hide the facebook updates. I believe something like this would make the facebook less noisy! What do you think?

To know the content of a particular variable during debugging, what we usually do is add it to the watch window or just hover the mouse over it and see the values as tool tip like window.

With Visual Studio 2010 You can pin this watch window in the source file like a notes. Whenever the data is changed, you can watch it instantly in the source file itself. Cool eh? See it here.

Start your Debugging

As you’re seeing above, hover the mouse on the required variable. Click on the pin button on the right end.

You can see close button to close the watch unpin button and expand button. You can also add the comments as you’re seeing above.

Once you step through debugging process, you can see this changing as below. if the data is updated, it will be displayed in red color.

It’s really cool when you’re watching the arrays.

You can selectively pin the array items and if necessary you can see the entire array as usual.

This can be moved from the current line of display. The blue color pin on the left side of the source window will move along and on hovering, it will display to which line this watch is attached with.

The interesting thing is that Visual Studio can remember your pins and can restore when you start over the debugging.

What the drawback I found in this, we can’t specify symbols for watch variables in this window. If it’s there, we do simple memory analysis and other handy display options easily.

This is a simple use case of this feature. It will be very handy in many critical debugging situations. For e.g. while working with multiple threads etc…