SnoozeTabs for Firefox is the first Mozilla Idea Town add-on

SnoozeTabs is the first extension for the Firefox browser to come out of Mozilla's new Idea Town project.

The opt-in project's main aim is to get feedback of release channel users faster by making available new features as add-ons prior to making the decision to implement it natively in the web browser.

The main idea behind the initial version of SnoozeTabs is to reduce tab clutter by putting select tabs to sleep for a certain period of time.

Basically, it allows you to schedule when tabs should reappear in the tab bar as they are removed from it once you make a selection.

The extension adds an icon to Firefox's address bar which, when activated, displays the available options for the current tab.

The options may be confusing on first glance as there are plenty of them. All have in common that they hide the active tab for a period of time.

• Later Today - hides the tab for several hours.
• Tonight - The tab is displayed again after 7pm.
• Tomorrow - The tab reappears the next day.
• This weekend - The tab is displayed on the next Saturday.
• Next Week - The tab reappears next week on the same day.
• Next Month - Same as week but for months.
• Rainy Day - The tab reappears within 6 months.
• Pick a Date - Lets you pick a custom date and time (does not seem to work right now)
• When I'm free - The tab reappears after spending more than 20 minutes on sites like Reddit or Facebook.

The tab is automatically removed from the Firefox tab bar once you make a selection. If it is the last tab of the window, that window will be closed.

You may use the manage snoozes link to manage all snoozed tabs. All snoozed tabs are listed under tags in the Firefox library.

While you get some management options there, for instance to open the url again in Firefox or to delete snoozed tabs, you cannot manipulate when the tab is displayed again in the browser.

Snoozing tabs moves them out of sight for the selected time which can be useful to combat tab overloading and for certain use cases, for instance to postpone interesting articles for the evening or weekend.

Mozilla plans to improve the add-on further. First, it wants to improve the management component of it. Instead of displaying snoozes tabs as tags in the Firefox library, the creators want to add a "Snooze Tabs" entry there that not only lists them all under its banner, but provides additional information such as the day or dated the tab is displayed again. Another planned addition is to add scheduling options to bookmarks.

Closing Words

SnoozeTabs is a handy add-on that helps move tabs out of the way so that you can better focus on current tasks and activities. A side effect is that it will reduce resource usage of the web browser, but usually not as much as if you'd run an add-on that unloads tabs automatically on inactivity.

It suffers from mediocre management options currently which the developers plan to address in future builds.