Firefox users have long been asking for an opening and closing animation to be added to tabs, and now they can rejoice! Starting with Firefox 57, tab animations will be available on all platforms. The animations are simple but effective. When a tab is opened, it zooms in and becomes active. When it is closed, the tab shrinks down and disappears from the screen. The animations are controlled by a new setting in Firefox’s preferences called “Animation Duration” which can be set to between 0 (no animation) and 10 seconds. The animations are subtle but they make a big difference. They make it easier for users to identify which tabs are currently open and which ones have been closed. They also help users remember where they left off when they switch between multiple tabs. We hope you enjoy the new tab animations as much as we do! ..

Note: The extension creator has noted that animation may appear jerky or fail to work on some extension-heavy Firefox profiles.

Blank Tabs and Tabs with Active Content

For our first example we opened a blank tab. As you can see here our cursor is still where the new tab button was while our blank tab is “growing” into existence.

Note: The Fade in option was not activated during our tests but is very easy to activate (see Options below).

You can see the blank tab fading out here as it grows shorter in length. The first tab came back into focus very quickly for us as the second tab was closing.

For our second example we opened a tab with active content from the Context Menu. You can see the webpage title appearing as the tab “grows” into place.

Closing the tab once again brought our first tab back into focus very quickly as the other faded out. Liquid Tabs definitely adds a fun element to opening and closing tabs while browsing.

Options

The options are very easy to sort through. Just choose the desired animation speed for opening/closing tabs, enable/disable the Fade function, and set the animation quality.

Note: Tab Fade in is disabled by default. We recommend enabling it for the full fun effect.

Download the Liquid Tabs extension (Mozilla Add-ons)