Too many tabs

Sometimes I need to have a lot of tabs open when I work. Things can get messy and slow. I have a few different strategies to manage them all. Here’s my top three.

  • In some cases, I’ll use different browsers to ringfence the tabs/bookmarks related to a particular job, and use the browser’s memory/history to re-open the tabs I need for that project when I resume.
  • I use OneTab, so that if I’m doing research and have a number of interesting tabs open that I’d like to come back to later, I can create a date-based list of just the useful stuff (rather than my browser history, which would show everything). A nice touch is that OneTab doesn’t include my pinned tabs when it makes its list.
  • A colleague recommended Tab Suspender, a Firefox plugin that puts individual tabs in your browser to sleep if you haven’t looked for them for a bit so that the resources on that page (including adverts) stop chewing your CPU making other tasks slow. It’s made a world of difference. There seem to be a wide range of similar plugins available.

Have you found other handy ways to bookmark/archive/manage your browser tabs? Comment below!

Accessing Geographically-Restricted Web Sites

So – hot on the heels of yesterday’s post on TV-less TV, here’s something I coincidentally discovered yesterday, courtesy of a post by Graham Linehan on an episode of the Daily Show that couldn’t be shown on UK TV.

Modify Headers is a free Firefox add-on that allows you to edit the HTTP request headers you send to web servers while browsing. Ostensibly, it’s intended for testing web sites to see how they respond to specific requests, but it is possible to use it to access some geographically-restricted content, such as on-demand TV programming.

Note: This worked on some sites I tried, but not on others, so results aren’t guaranteed. Maybe I was picking bad IP addresses, or maybe the sites in question have a way of checking if this add-on is in use.

To use the Modify Headers add-on:

  1. Install Firefox if you don’t already have it.
  2. Download and install the Modify Headers add-on.
  3. Restart Firefox.
  4. In Firefox, select Tools | Modify Headers.
  5. In the dialog box that appears:
    1. From the Select Action drop-down, select Add.
    2. In the Header Name field, enter X-Forwarded-For.
    3. In the Header Value field, enter an IP address appropriate to the country you want to pretend you’re from (12.13.14.15 worked as a US address for me).
    4. Click Add.
      Your header is added to the list area.

    Modify Headers Dialog Box

  6. Repeat step 5 as many times as necessary to set up headers for each country you want to pretend you’re in.
  7. Before browsing to restricted content, turn the appropriate header on and the others off.
    Enabled headers have a green dot at the end of the row in the list area; disabled ones have a red dot.
    To change a header’s status, double-click that header’s row.
  8. Leave the Modify Headers dialog box open! Your modified headers are only sent while the dialog box is open.
  9. Browse to the geographically-restricted content you want to view, and away you go (hopefully!).