Implement option to display tab thumbnails in sidebar

[grahamperrin]

From #13 (comment):

… Anybody with a creative idea to keep a similar, space saving feature?

From my point of view, the extension does already save space by not using thumbnails.

Enhancement request

A user preference, to show thumbnails.

I guess, it will be relatively easy to aim for the approaches taken by Tab Center and Tab Center Redux – where it seems that prominence is given more to the text than to the thumbnail.

Maybe less easy to realise (within the constraints of WebExtensions APIs) … before I switched from Macs to FreeBSD-based systems, I was a lover of OmniWeb – where prominence could (maybe still can be) given more to the thumbnail than to the text. From http://archive.is/UNAq (a 2012-06-29 snapshot of http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omniweb/):

From Is OmniWeb the Best Surviving Free Browser for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger? | Low End Mac (2011-01-10):

… dislike thumbnail bookmarks tabs. … precious screen real estate for us small-display laptop users, which is my main complaint about the thumbnails – not the pictures.

… 1024 x 768 …

[Croydon]

I will implement these two features eventually:

• show tab thumbnail in tab toolbar while hovering over it
• show tab thumbnail directly in sidebar

However, I prioritize other features higher, so it will take some time to get here.

One of the reasons is that VTR is mainly used by power users to handle tons of tabs. Displaying thumbnails makes it really, really hard to handle (e.g. scroll through) hundreds of hundreds of tabs. Performance might be another problem.
This feature is targetting rather another user group which isn't the main user group right now, but I agree that it is a reasonable feature with can can make navigation easier when only a few tabs are opened (or visible) per window.

[grahamperrin]

FYI

Visual Tabs