BarTab has a faithful user base. Every day I get emails that look approximately like this:
Thing is, I made BarTab when I was a grad student because it was something I and Firefox needed at the time. Things have changed. I no longer am a grad student with lots of disposable time (yeah, right) and frankly, there are more important things at stake in Firefox land.
Firefox is stepping up
But! The good news is that Firefox is slowing assimilating BarTab’s feature set. That’s right! Let me show you how:
Since Firefox 8, you can tell Firefox to only load your tabs on demand, just like with BarTab. You can find this setting in the Firefox options/preferences dialog:
What’s more, my tireless colleagues Paul O’Shannessy and Tim Taubert are working on bringing even more BarTab-like features, e.g. the auto-unloading.
Who wants the keys?
As far as BarTab’s future is concerned, there might be hope. People have forked it on GitHub and apparently made it work (great work, whoever you are!), other people have made XPIs with fixes available. This is awesome, but I can’t just merge their work and release it. At least I don’t want to put my name on something that I haven’t thoroughly reviewed and tested. But, if somebody else wants to take than on, I’d be more than happy to hand the keys to BarTab over. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested!
