Firefox: tabbrowser extension

Factual Questions
1

It seems that the tabbrowser extension to firefox has updated itself like six times in the last two weeks.

Now my favorite feature is broken and I can’t seem to fix it.

Previously, when surfing the dope or other pages, I could control-click a link and it would open a new tab in the background. This was great because I could go down the page clicking links and then read them one by one.

Now when I control-click a link, it opens a new tab in the foreground, so I have to click back to the main page to open more tabs.

Now I know there are a million options there, so let me tell you what I don’t want:

I don’t want every link to open a new a new tab.

I don’t want every new tab to open in the background.

I’d still like a shift-click to open a new window.

I’d still like regular clicks to different domains to open a new tab in the foreground.
That’s how it was, anyway, and it was tits.

This has been irking me for weeks and messing up my feng shui (not really), but I’d appreciate any insight.

Thanks

2

Eh… I do that with the scroll wheel click. shrug

3

This is a laptop… no scroll wheel.

4

Drag the link to a space on the tab bar.

5

Can you revert to an older version and turn off the autoupdate?

6

**Menu **->**Tab **->TabBrowser Extensions Preferences

from the tree on the preferences window:

Use **Tab **-> **Links **

select ‘Open in current tab’ radio button
Check the box ‘load in thebackground for Middle-Click or Ctl-Click’

7

There’s a reason I hate tabbrowser extensions . . .

Namely, because you have to hit alt-enter to open a link in a new tab from the URL bar. Which is not just oddly inconsistent with the whole “CTRL-click” thing, but also inconsistent with a setting I got used to when I used Mozilla.

I really wish Firefox didn’t offload quite so many of the configurations to third-party extensions . . .

8

Why do you need Tab Browser Extensions anyway? I Ctrl-click a link to open a page in the background, and I don’t have TBE installed.

9

TBE gives you a lot more control about what gets automatically loaded into a new tab, etc.

It also has this annoying habit of resetting random preferences whenever you update it, so I’ve made it a point not to update it.

-lv

10

That’s my question, too. I liked using the wheel-click to open a link in a new tab in the background. So I got the TabBrowser extension, even though I didn’t find a description of what it did, figuring that I would be able to figure it out. Still, all I get is “Enhances control over some aspects of tabbed browsing.” But there are apparently no options. Anybody know what this does? (For the record, I have v 1.2.2, and the only update that I was prompted to do was a few days ago.)

11

Um, installing TBE should have added a “Tab” listing on your main menu bar, which then gives you a cubic shitload of options too numberous to mention. A few of the ones that I found more usable involved when to use tabs, under the “use tab” subpreferences of the tabbrowser extensions preferences.

For instance, for each link clicked on, you can choose to open it in the current tab, open in a new tab, or open in a new background tab. If you choose open in the current tab, you can then say “if it’s a link to an external web site, then open it in a new tab.” This is also where the “load in the background for middle-click” option is.

Then, for each of 6 other classes of links (link from another application, popup, from bookmark, from live bookmark, from history (right clicking on the back/forward buttons and selecting something, say, 2 pages back), from the location bar, and search results from the searchbar), you can select if the link gets opened in the current tab, in a new tab, or a new background tab.

So, for one example, without TBE, search results from the searchbar always show up in the current tab. With TBE, you can make them show up in a new background tab.

12

I use the Tab Browser Preferences extension. It isn’t as buggy as TBE and does the job perfectly.

13

Same here.

Though I still wish that features - that are implemented by the browser mind you - would be accessible without having to install third party stuff.

14

I had to uninstall TBE because it’s just too buggy. The last straw was when it started preventing me from installing any new extensions - I’d click on an XPI link and absolutely nothing would happen. Uninstalled it and everything was fine again. I’ll give TBP a shot.

15

Thank you Peter, that did the trick. Sonsabitches had Ctrl-click hidden way back there on the middle click tab! Who’da thunk it?

Thanks again

16

This is precisely what happened to me. I love the extension, I think it’s one of the shining examples of how extendable Firefox is, but it’s too damned buggy for me to actually use.

It’s a great idea marred by an unacceptably bad execution.

As for the prediliction of Firefox developers to relegate some things to extensions, it’s partially based on the technical desire to keep the browser small and fast (as opposed to Mozilla, which grew rather slow and bloated with age) and a philosophical desire to keep it simple enough for everyone (whereas Mozilla was by coders and for coders, leaving the Netscape/AOL folks to develop the code into something aimed at nontechnical people).

Firefox began as a proof-of-concept of how easy it was to embed the Gecko rendering engine into a painfully basic but usable browser application. It grew from that into something very nice, but like punk rock it will always err on the side of leaving things out.

Here is a history of Firefox.
The Wikipedia article has further insight.