All I want is for Firefox to maximize every new window it opens. I know it’s doable, but how? I managed to do it when I first installed Firefox; I loathe tabbed browsing, so I set up “middle-click to open new window” and “maximize all new windows” preferences, both of which were lost when I had to do a recent format and reinstall. I remember how I did the former, but the latter eludes me.
I’ve dug around in about:config to no avail, and my Google-fu is officially exhausted…no useful results, though I did turn up about a dozen people asking this exact question and receiving a helpful “I dunno” or “switch to Opera”.
I hope someone here can help, because that Opera choice is starting to sound pretty good.
I don’t know how exhaustive you mean by “every new window”–does this include things like pop-up video windows, or do you just want the default window (e.g. via control-N) to be maximized? I don’t know how to do the former easily. For the latter, here’s what my version of Mozilla seems to do. (1) The size and normal/maximized status of the first window opened when Mozilla starts up is the same as that of the last window closed before it last exited. (This is saved in localstore.rdf in your Mozilla/Profiles directory; for more information see below.) So just keeping most of your windows maximized (keyboard shortcut: control-space X) should make new ones maximized as well. (2) After the first window is opened, later windows are opened with the same size and status as their direct parents. (So if you have two Mozilla windows open, one maximized and one not, pressing control-N from the two windows will give you one new maximized window and one unmaximized.) (3) Scripting languages (e.g., JavaScript) can specify requested sizes for newly-opened windows. I don’t know whether you can easily override these requests.
Of course your OS, version, and corresponding mileage may vary.
localstore.rdf is an XML file. The size preferences for the various different sorts of Mozilla windows are stored here; I think the file gets overwritten each time Mozilla exits and is read only when Mozilla starts up. For the Mozilla “Navigator” (browser) windows, you are interested in an RDF:Description record with an attribute RDF:about=“chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul#main-window”; it will have another attribute sizemode, which can be set to “normal” (unmaximized) or “maximized” (as well as “minimized”). Of course you want sizemode=“maximized”; if you are sufficiently motivated you could have a script to set this every time Mozilla runs.
There’s probably some way to set this permanently, but I don’t know enough about Mozilla customization to do this the right way.
Maybe this is what’s changing their size? Try taking away that ability:
Tools -> Options -> Content -> (Next to “Enable Javascript”) Advanced -> uncheck “Move or resize existing windows”.
Omphaloskeptic: Ideally, it would only maximize windows opened through Ctrl+N and links opened through “Open in New Window”, but if I have to deal with the occasional maximized popup, that’d be preferable to this…not too many popups in Firefox anyway. Thanks for the advice, but I’ve already tried force-resetting the defaults as you suggest – open new windows, maximize them, close them, rinse and repeat – with no luck.
Reply, I did as you suggested, since I don’t want Javascript resizing my windows for kicks, but JS isn’t the source of my current woes. Firefox is simply set to open new windows as “floaters” by default.
What does your localstore.rdf say? --Under RDF:about=“chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul#main-window” is sizemode=“normal” or sizemode=“maximized”? (If it’s set to normal, edit it to maximized and try again.)