GlitchNYC

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!

Posted by Eric Skiff Filed in Uncategorized, annoynace, firefox, firefox2, hint, mozilla, tab, tabs, tip, tweak

2 Comments »

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!