Windows 7 Taskbar shows a Thumbnail view of all the open windows and applications, including open tabs in a web browser. You can maximize a browser tab by looking at its thumbnail preview.
Although this is great feature added in Windows 7, but it has certain restrictions. Firstly, the number of thumbnails that can be seen at a time are limited based on the screen resolution. Once that limit is reached the thumbnail preview is changed into a list mode.
Secondly, for a power user, like me, who mostly open a number of tabs in a browser at a time, it is not a great feature. It is more than a hindrance. If you are one of those like me, here is how it can be disabled. I am using Firefox here.
1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the address bar. Press Enter.
2. In the Filter box type browser.taskbar.previews.enable.
3. Double click on it, it will be changed to False. Actually it acts as a toggle, if it is false, it will be changed to true, and if it is true it will be changed to false.
4. That’s it. Restart Firefox.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Any suggestions when setting it to false doesn’t work? I’m using 3.6.3 and it just started showing the superbar taskbar stuff even though firefox’s browser.taskbar.previews.enable is set to false. Has been since I’d rather not use it for the same reason as you. I have numerous tabs open and I have no need for it. Plus I’m noticing that the bars icons are usually wrong compared to the tabs I have open. I’m wondering if my firefox install has become borked. Any thoughts?
Ditto here Tim. FF 3.6.3, and 64 bit Win7. It was set to false right out of the box yet I got the preview windows. I set it to true and then back to false and that fixed it. For a while. Then they started slowly coming back: three tabs, six, seven, ten. Every time I clicked more would show up. The false/true/false trick seemed to work a couple times. Now it’s completely ignored. No idea how to fix it. I HATE this feature. I can’t believe 99% of the planet doesn’t have more than 3 tabs open at a time.