This simple but effective extension adds a badge to your open Firefox tabs to alert you of new messages – and gives a numeric indicator of how many are waiting to be read.
It’s ideal for sites that you regularly leave open in tabs e.g. Twitter, webmail and Facebook – the badge makes it easy to see when you have new messages, without having to constantly switch back to the tab to check.
Tab Badge works with normal tabs and the smaller App (pinned) tabs, it doesn’t hide the site icon and it’s easy to read. The extension is available from Mozilla Addons here, no restart required.
Once installed, it should automatically start displaying notification badges as new messages arrive. If for some reason you don’t want a badge to appear for a particular site, you can easily blacklist it – right click the tab and choose ‘Blacklist Tab Badge for’ that site name.
Other options are available via Firefox Menu \ Add-ons (or Tools \ Add-ons) – selecting the Tab Badge Options, you can change the badge style and background/foreground color if you don’t like white on red. You can also choose to only show badges for domains on a whitelist – this may be useful if you only want badges to appear for just 1 site as it would be quicker to whitelist just that site than to try to blacklist notifications for all other sites.
Conclusion
Tab Badge is one of those handy extensions that you never knew you needed – until you have used it for a while… It makes it much easier to see if new messages are available and saves time as you don’t have to keep checking.
