This is handy for sites you keep open all the time, like Facebook or Gmail, that you don't want to accidentally close.

With a couple of Firefox add-ons, you can get this functionality and more in Firefox 3.6.

Here's an example of what pinning tabs looks like in Chrome (click to enlarge the pic). The first three tabs -- Facebook, CNN and the New York Times -- have been pinned into App Tabs.

Installation

To be able to pin app tabs in a similar fashion in Firefox 3.6 and get a slew of other tab-related features, just install these two add-ons:

1. Tab Mix Plus -- This gives you lots of options for tab management that I won't be covering here

2. Faviconize Tab -- This allows you to reduce a tab's width to just the site favicon

Configuration

From Firefox's Tools menu, choose Add-ons. Go to Tab Mix Plus and choose Options, then -> Display -> Tab -> Show on Tab and uncheck the boxes for Locked and Protected under Show on Tab.

Then, still in the Tab Mix Plus options, go to Mouse -> Mouse Clicking -> Double-click and set on a tab to Protects and Locks the tab.

Next, go to the options for Faviconize Tab -> Quick Faviconize and check the box for Double Click.

By using double-click for both Protect & Lock in Tab Mix Plus and Quick Faviconize in Faviconize Tab, you make the entire process as easy as double-clicking. I recommend removing the protect and lock icons from being shown on the tab because they can obscure the favicon.

Ta-da!

Now when you double-click a tab in Firefox 3.6, it will lock it (so you can't close it), protect it (so you can't accidentally go to another URL), and faviconize it (reduce its width to just the web site's favicon.

If you want, you can set double-clicking to protect OR lock a tab for even more control.

Here's what it looks like, with the same three sites pinned as App Tabs -- Gmail, Facebook and CNN:

If you save your tabs when you quit Firefox, they'll show up as App Tabs when you relaunch the browser.

There is a Firefox add-on that promises the same feature, called App Tabs. However it has not yet been reviewed by Mozilla, whereas the two I recommended have.

Tab Mix Plus comes with the added benefit of giving you lots of other good features, like progress bars on tabs, different styling for the titles of tabs you haven't read yet and more.

For journalists, the best way to use them is by clicking "Sort By Date" after searching Google News but before signing up for the e-mail alert. That way you always get the newest information, and you can sort out what's relevant to you.

The techniques available to refine regular Google search results are also available for Google News alerts.

If you work for a newspaper covering Lynchburg, Virginia, and you have a Google alert for "Lynchburg," you'll probably be bombarded with news alerts from your own paper. Since you'll already be familiar with those stories, these alerts will be useless.

In Google searches, you can restrict a search to a specific site using the following:

searchterm site:domain.com

For example,

"City Council" site:newsadvance.com

to search for "City Council" only on www.newsadvance.com.

Similarly, you can exclude specific sites by adding a minus sign before the site parameter, like

"Lynchburg" -site:newsadvance.com

By using "-site:newsadvance.com," I will exclude www.newsadvance.com from search results for "Lynchburg." This is OK because I work for www.newsadvance.com and am already familiar with its stories.

After turning that search result into an e-mail alert, I won't be hit with lots of e-mails about stories from my own paper.