Comments on: Work Around for Firefox 3’s ‘Open in Tabs’ Overwrite Bug

By: The Daleisphere — How I Configure Firefox

The Daleisphere — How I Configure Firefox — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:02:20 +0000

[...] several months after Firefox 3 was released I used various work-arounds to make Firefox work that way again. Ultimately Martin Warger wrote ‘ReplaceTabs Extension 1’ to solve this [...]

By: The Daleisphere — Fix For Firefox 3’s ‘Open in Tabs’ Overwrite Bug

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:46:12 +0000

[...] May 25, 2008, I wrote this post about Firefox 3’s ‘Open in Tabs’ Overwrite Bug. That post has been, by far, the [...]

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:09:28 +0000

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm a middle clicker on both my desktops and my laptops. I'm hoping Firefox addresses this in version 3.5 coming out sometime soon.

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:09:28 +0000

Thanks, I'll check it out. I'm a middle clicker on both my desktops and my laptops. I'm hoping Firefox addresses this in version 3.5 coming out sometime soon.

By: Foxenesys

Foxenesys — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:45:38 +0000

I tried the "openintabs-erase" extension and it's maybe another solution for some, but not for me simply because it relies on a middle click behaviour.

I'm working on a laptop and the middle click is out of question.

So I'll roll back to the replacetabs extensions, once I'll found out why it makes my personal bar diseappear...

By: Foxenesys

Foxenesys — Fri, 01 May 2009 11:45:38 +0000

By: Crillion

Crillion — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:04:28 +0000

oops sorry I didn’t see this trick was already described under workaround 4…

By: Crillion

Crillion — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:01:53 +0000

I have found another workaround, and it works without extensions. When you want to have a new tab group overwriting another already opened, just right-click one of your tabs (the nearest you can click); a menu appears; choose “close other tabs”; and then middle-click your new folder of bookmarks. The remaining tab will scroll to the left, and all the other tabs will be appended; they will even appear with the first bookmark being the first tab on the left (the older tab will disappear on the left of the browser screen).

You can do this anytime, after all it’s not so bad to have a remaing tab on the left. I loved the old behaviour, and I’m confident that the mozilla community will add it back to the browser.

Thanks

By: McSee

McSee — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 03:16:42 +0000

We all know about Microsoft products.
We kwon they suck. But they are almost always backward compatible
FF3 is not. I stay with 2 until I see a proper solution

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:57:49 +0000

Johan, all I can suggest is to become a member of Mozilla’s bugzilla development forum and contribute. That’s what I’m doing. As I mentioned above there are several bugzilla threads devoted to this topic. The one I’m participating in the most is here:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=426127

Matt. I share your pain. But FF2 is a real dog with its memory leaks. It was constantly (almost daily) crashing my Vista 64 system and FF3 never crashes. But if you can live with FF2 you could wait it out trhere. My sense is the development team (these are all guys doing this for free so we can’t be too demanding) knows about it and will at some point get around to it. Whether that is next month or next year i can’t say.

…Dale

By: Ryk

Ryk — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 15:35:59 +0000

This turned out to be a show stopper for me. They made great strides in the performance and memory areas and completely negated them (again, for me) by disabling this option. I can understand both sides of the replace / append argument but removing the option is not an option. Guess I’ll be another one upgrading to FF2 until a better fix comes around….

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:19:46 +0000

I excitedly downloaded 3.0 on release day and installed it. What a stupid mistake not only did it somehow wipe out my bookmarks and replace them with a set from nearly a year ago, quite what happened there is anyones guess, but it introduced this new “feature” Until a fix is available and I can toggle the behavior to “overwrite” from “append” I’ll have to stick with FF 2. Grrrrrrrrrrr

By: johan

johan — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:33:34 +0000

Dale,

Thanks for keeping track of this, this new FF3 behavior annoys me immensely. I installed ‘tab clicking options’ and it makes life a little bit better but still not great….

Do you have any recommendation on how we can persuade the FF developers to fix this in the next . release? Certain bug we should vote for?

Thanks,

Johan

By: cooch

cooch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:30:57 +0000

Much lighter, IMO. The beta build for Tab Mix Plus works (just tried it), but is so bloated with stuff I don’t want/need, it seems like overkill for present purposes. Plus, its clearly beta – there are a number of glitches with how tabs are rendered, enough to keep me with Tab Clicking Options….for now.

Note that the two Addons are not mutually compatible (not surprisingly) – one or the other.

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 18:23:08 +0000

Thanks cooch.

I’ll give that a look. By your description, I’m not sure it gets me any further than the Tab Mix Plus extension, but if its a lighter footprint then perhaps I’ll switch to it. I’ll post an update once I’ve given it a try.

Thanks again.

…Dale

By: cooch

cooch — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:03:57 +0000

I have run into the same issue, and short of convincing the dev team to reconstitute the ‘missing feature’ into FF3, the following addon seems to help get there from here in the short run – try installing

Tab Clicking Options (0.6.9 as of this post)

Its easy to set up a keyboard/mouse combination that closes *all* tabs. If I could hack it to eliminate the need for a mouse click, so much the better, but for now, it at least lets me easily close all active tabs before loading another new tab folder.

By: SiberX

SiberX — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 00:58:59 +0000

I am experiencing exactly this problem as well – for me, it’s nearly use-breaking. I simply don’t understand the logic behind literally removing the functionality of a config option in a new version. It was working before – why SWAP the default behaviour AND prevent users from switching it back? Senseless.

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:50:26 +0000

Joey, I’m not having your experience. If I have just one tab open and I open a group of tabs all at once (and I just tried your exact example of IMDb and local theatres because I do the same thing), the new group opens to the right of the currently open Tab. So, if I had 1 open and open a new group of 5 more tabs I end up with 6 tabs when I, personally, would only want the 5.

…Dale

By: I agree

I agree — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:11:37 +0000

I’m glad I’m not alone in this as well. I will be sticking with FF2 until they resolve this.

By: Joey Connick

Joey Connick — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:04:33 +0000

What kills me about this is that in all the hue and cry about losing the ability to overwrite existing tabs, people seem to have forgotten that with respect to the append behaviour, there’s also been a change that is not overridable: previous if you had N tabs open and you appended a folder with X tabs, you’d end up with N + X open tabs. Now appending overwrites your current tab with the first of the X tabs and you end up with N – 1 + X open tabs.

Sure, it’s minor, and sure, it was changed because when you load a single bookmark, it overwrites your current tab and they want to provide consistent behaviour… but it’s still a big change to how things worked before and they don’t provide any way to get back to that behaviour that I got used to… and I assume I’m not the only person who got used to things this way. Having to open another blank tab BEFORE I load a bookmark folder is annoying. Having to finish with the contents of my current tab before I load a bookmark folder is annoying.

Here’s an example of my personal browsing behaviour where this is annoying: say I’m checking out a movie on IMDb. I have a folder of Google movie showtime bookmarks for the 5 or 6 theatres nearest me. I used to be able to open that folder and not worry about the info on the movie from IMDb getting overwritten by the first theatre’s showtime listings. In Firefox 3, I lose the IMDb content… not permanently because I can always hit “Back” but I can’t have both my IMDb content and my first movie showtime listing content open at the same time. So now I have to open a new window or create a blank tab before I quickly and conveniently open up my showtime listings tabs. *sigh*

By: Dale Dietrich

Dale Dietrich — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:05:51 +0000

I feel your pain Joseph! I would revert back myself but FF2 was just too unstable for me – routinely pulling down my systems with memory leaks. As soon as I find a solution, I’ll post it here. I’m keenly looking every day.

By: Joseph

Joseph — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 16:27:38 +0000

I really thought I was the only one who used this functionality, and it really pains me to see it gone. I have reverted back to FF2 until I see a working solution.