I just upgraded to Firefox 9 on my Mac and I’m having an odd, annoying problem with it: the only way I can close the last window/tab is by using my mouse to click the “close” button in the window’s title bar. Neither the Command-W command nor selecting “Close” from the File menu works.
Let’s say I have three web pages open, each in its own tab in the same window, and I want to close all of them without quitting the browser. Traditionally, in Firefox and every other tabbed browser I’ve ever used, I would simply use Command-W three times and that would close everything. The first two Command-W’s would close the first two tabs, and the third Command-W would close the remaining window. In Firefox 9, however, those three consecutive Command-W’s simply close out the three open Web pages as if they were simply tabs within the enclosing window, leaving me with a “blank” browser window that I can only close by manually clicking the red “Close Window” button. (For Windows users who may be reading this, closing the last window in a Mac app doesn’t quit the application like it does on Windows.)
This is annoying because I like to have my e-mail client open behind my Web browser when I’m, say, going through the e-mails from the SDMB notifying me of replies to my subscribed threads. I’ll click the link in the e-mail to open the thread in my browser, read the new posts and perhaps add a reply, and then close the window. That lets me simply click on my e-mail window to bring it to the front, where I can continue to the next e-mail and repeat the process. For me, this is quicker and easier than repeatedly Command-TABbing between the two programs.
An additional annoyance here is that, if I do leave that blank Firefox window open and Command-TAB to my e-mail client, when I click on the link in the next e-mail Firefox opens that link, not in the existing blank window, but in a new tab in that window.
I’ve gone over every setting I can find in Firefox, and I cannot figure out what is keeping that last, blank window open. Any ideas? The only addon I have installed is AdBlockPlus.
(And for those who will suggest using Chrome instead, that’s what I’ve been using for the last several months. I like it, except for two major annoyances: Google Chrome frequently chokes on Google-owned YouTube, and the bizarre way Chrome will not let me even scroll a Web page until it’s finished loading every last thing on the page, which means I can often read only the first few lines of an article because the ads and all the connections to Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc haven’t finished loading.)