How to turn off Firefox 2’s scrolling tab bar
October 25th, 2006
After using it for a day, one more thing drove me batty about Firefox 2. With more than a few tabs open, they started scrolling all over the place, making it extremely difficult to jump back and forth between them.
Here’s how to turn the tab scrolling feature off:
- Go to about:config
- Filter for the word tab
- set browser:tabs:tabMinWidth to 0
Maybe I’m stuck in my old ways, but I use tabbed browsing a LOT and so far, I don’t count these two changes as improvements. I do love the dropdown list of tab names on the right though!
Easily get rid of the “close tab” buttons in Firefox 2
October 25th, 2006
Okay. I already love Firefox 2 for the integrated spell-checker alone, and as someone who often has way too many tabs open, I appreciate the new little interface at the right of the tab bar for listing them.
That said, I’m perfectly comfortable middle-clicking (pressing down my mouse wheel, for the un-initiated) to open and close tabs, so losing valuable space where the names of my tabs go for lots of little “close tab” buttons was not my favorite change.
Predictably, the smart folks developing Firefox hid this potentially confusing option from most users, but it’s still easy to get to if you know what you’re doing.
Here’s how to turn them off and get that tab-bar real estate back.
- Open a new tab with crtl-t. the address bar, type about:config
- There’s lots of options here, so type “tab” in the filter bar
- You might be interested in some of the other options here, but the one that concerns us for the moment is
- browser.tabs.closeButtons
- Edit it and set the value to 0
- Close and reopen Firefox, pop open some tabs, and they should look nice and clean.
The close button still shows up on the tab you’re on, but since you’re already on that page, you really don’t need to read the tab.
For those of you that miss the stationary close-tab X at the right of the tab bar, you can close the current tab with ctrl-w, eliminating the need to hunt around for the red X to close each one.
Don’t forget that you can middle click tabs to close them too!
Clipmarks is a Firefox “Featured Plugin”!
October 25th, 2006
Okay, I’ve been a little quiet about this so far here on the blog, but today I’ve got an amazing reason to break the silence! I’ve been spending my Thursdays with the excellent folks at Clipmarks for a few weeks now, helping to brainstorm about how to build and strengthen the Clipmarks community, and how to invite others in.
We call Clipmarks “Bite-size highlights of the web.” It’s a combination of a tool that lets you “clip” the best parts of web pages and a site (clipmarks.com) where you can share those clips with other clippers. My first experience with clipmarks.com was 30 minutes of non-stop consumption. As I sat there, a seemingly endless number of interesting snippets flowed up my screen. Instead of having to jump out of the experience to check out every cool page, the best part was already highlighted for me and shown right on the page. I was able to just kinda sit back and take it all in.
My second “ohmygodthisiscool” moment happened a few weeks later, when I saw the clipping tool in action for the first time. You really have to see it in action to get why it’s so awesome, but selecting the best parts of a page is as simple as clicking on a paragraph and picture or two and clicking save. It’s so intuitive and easy that it’s addictive.
Which leads to my amazing reason for posting today. A few weeks back, we were listing things that we should be doing to help get Clipmarks out there, and among them was ensuring that the awesome clipping tool (which is available as a Firefox add-on) was featured on Mozilla.com.
I don’t know if my suggestion had anything to do with it or if it was simple serendipity but a few weeks later an opportunity arose for Clipmarks to be not only included in the add-ons page, but to be highlighted among the recommended add-ons for Firefox 2.
Well, Firefox 2 dropped today, and we’re right up there with some of the best add-ons available as a recommended add-on. We’ll even show up in random rotation on the post-install page! I’m still amazingly excited that this all came together, and it can only lead to good things.
I’m sure I’ll talk a lot more about Clipmarks in the coming weeks and months, but right now, I’m just really proud of and happy for the guys there. They work their butts off and really care about (and are part of) their community. I also want to throw a huge thank you out to the amazing Tara Hunt for getting me in touch with Clipmarks in the first place. It’s been amazing and no matter where this goes from here I’m extremely happy just for the experience of having worked with them for the past few weeks.
Well, so what are you waiting for? Go install the clipping tool and start highlighting the best bits of the web!
GlitchNYC is the personal blog of Eric Skiff, Community Evangelist for 
Home
The Alternative Music Show
Felt Up TV
Old photos
New photos
Pre Oct. 2005 articles
Contact
Subscribe
Handheld Music
