The Bottom Line
ThumbStrips is an add-on for the Firefox Web browser which creates a filmstrip of thumbnail images depicting pages that you have recently visited. This functionality makes it easy to locate and return to pages in your browsing history with a simple click of the mouse.
Pros
- ThumbStrips makes navigating through your browsing history an easier and more powerful experience.
- Specific sites or domains can be blocked from being recorded.
- Thumbnails can be dragged and dropped within the filmstrip to create your own sort order.
- Your thumbnails can be saved to disk so you can share them with co-workers, family, and friends.
- Being able to quickly search through the text of all visited pages is a very useful feature.
Cons
- Unlike most add-ons, you have to accept a detailed End User License Agreement prior to installation.
- Users have complained about memory resource issues once their Thumbstrip has grown to larger sizes.
Description
- ThumbStrips adds a filmstrip of images that are displayed in the bottom half of your Firefox browser window.
- Each thumbnail image represents a Web page that you have recently visited.
- Accompanying each image is the respective page's URL as well as the time that has passed since your last visit to said page.
- The ThumbStrip viewer can be easily opened or closed via several different menu or keyboard shortcuts.
- A recording feature gives you the ability to browse without adding new thumbnails to the filmstrip.
- Separate thumbnails are captured from each and every open tab within your Firefox browser.
- When a thumbnail is clicked, the scroll position that you were previously at on a page is loaded within the current tab.
- All sites within the Thumbstrip can be instantaneously searched using any body text within the sites themselves.
- Multiple methods of scrolling through the Thumbstrip are offered.
- Thumbnail properties including title, URL, date/time of visits, # of visits, and searchable text can be easily displayed.
Guide Review - ThumbStrips
From the same company who brought us TurboTax and Quicken comes ThumbStrips, a free Firefox add-on which greatly improves upon the way browsing history is utilized. Forget about trudging through folders full of links trying to find that great site you visited a while back. ThumbStrips adds a new dimension to the concept of retracing our steps on the Web, turning each visited page into a thumbnail image. Navigating these images is effortless, and there are features in place to instantaneously search through content on all the pages within your history. Filters and blocking techniques allow you to specify what does and does not get added to this history, adding an important element of privacy to the extension. The appearance and location of the filmstrip, or Thumbstrip, fits well with Firefox's overall interface and it can be easily hidden when the need arises. There are some minor memory issues when a Thumbstrip grows too large, but the developers at Intuit seem determined to keep improving upon the current application so the future looks bright in that regard. I've added ThumbStrips to my cache of Firefox add-ons and I use it every day. I suggest you do the same.
