Manage and Customize Tabs in Firefox
Posted on March 19, 2010 at 5:30 am
Commanding 46.5% of the market share, Firefox is the number one web browser on the planet. Surprisingly, Microsoft Internet Explorer (all versions) captures only 35.3% of the market share with Chrome (11.6%), Safari (3.8), and Opera (2.1%) distant competitors.
Some claim that Microsoft’s decline in the web browser market was due to its unwillingness to release a successor to its popular Internet Explorer 6 for so long. Long after many browsers adopted new technologies and functions, Microsoft was simply playing catch up when it released IE7 and later IE8.
One of the most convenient features adopted by contemporary web browsers is tabbed browsing. No longer must you open a separate instance of the application to display multiple web pages.
Firefox’s tabbed browsing feature is one of the best examples of this advancement. Read on to learn how to configure Firefox 3.6’s tabbed browsing feature to customize your browsing experience.
Manage Firefox 3.6’s Tabs
To see the tabbed browsing options available to you in Firefox 3.6, begin by opening Firefox and clicking on Tools>Options.
You should now be looking at Firefox’s Options window. Click on the Tabs tab and you will see five options, several of which may or may not be checked already.
What follows is an option-by-option description of how each if these tab options affect your browsing experience.
Open New Windows in a New Tab Instead. Some websites make use of certain code to open their links in a new window rather than using the current one. This is done so you remember to come back to the original page and continue viewing its content. Also, middle clicking (wheel mouse click) on any link also opens a link in a new window. Checking this option forces Firefox 3.6 to use tabs rather than new windows to display new content.
Warn Me When Closing Multiple Tabs. This option is most useful when you routinely have many tabs open at the same time. Nothing is more frustrating than when you have lots of websites displayed in many tabs and you accidentally close the browser losing all of the content you had displayed. Check this option to help you avoid losing what you were doing with multiple tabs open at the same time.
Warn Me When Opening Multiple Tabs Might Slow Down Firefox. This one won’t come up much but it is possible to open so many tabs that your computer and Firefox will slow down considerably while they fulfill all of your requests to load lots of web pages. It is best to keep this one checked to avoid slowdowns or unresponsive programs.
Always Show the Tab Bar. This option lets you specify whether the tab bar is present even when you have only one web page displayed in Firefox. You can add additional tabs by clicking to the right of the current tab.
Unless you need to preserve every millimeter of screen real estate, it is much more convenient to leave this option checked so you can add as many tabs as you need without having to first click on a link.
When I Open a Link in a New Tab, Switch to it Immediately. This option is one of personal preference depending on how you browse web pages. If you want to see web pages when you click on their links, then make sure this option is checked.
However, some people prefer to open a bunch of web pages and then browse them one by one. One popular way of doing this is to go to a news site and click on each of the stories that interest you to set up a kind of queue. If this is your style of browsing the web, leave this option unchecked.
Firefox 3.6 offers the user some useful options when it comes to how browsing tabs are handled. However, consider using Tabberwocky if you really want to take control of Firefox’s tabs.
» Filed Under Computer Tips
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Nice Tutorial.. Good Job, thanks
This is like elementary school stuff. Could you write some more advanced tips on Firefox? Maybe like working with multiple profiles, etc?