Tab behavior in Firefox

Factual Questions
1

I’ve been watching threads about Firefox problems and haven’t seen this one yet.

When I read the SDMB, I open threads in a new tab from the listings and then I read each thread and closing each tab as I read each thread.

It used to be that if I clicked on a link in a thread, it would open a new tab and when I was done, it would return to the last tab I was viewing.

At some point a couple of months ago, this stopped working. It now goes to the tab furthest to the right instead of the tab I was viewing.

I’m running Firefox 3.0.10.

Last night I was at a friend’s house and I noticed that his tabs behaved the way mine used to. He’s running the same version of Firefox.

I can’t find any setting to change this behavior. Any ideas?

2

I have seen mine do what you describe and sometimes it doesn’t. So, I decided to research this and I think I have found what you are looking for.

Open a new browser window and type in about:config in the address bar.

Click “I’ll be careful” on the warning notice.

Then, in the filter box type browser.tabs

Look in that list for this setting: browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose

This setting should be set to true to return to the tab which opened the new tab, as described here: Browser.tabs.selectOwnerOnClose - MozillaZine Knowledge Base

I hope that was what you were looking for.

3

I checked and it’s set to “true”. I tried toggling it to false and then back to true and it still doesn’t work.

It’s got to have something to do with a add-on or extension or script I was running. I scrolled through that list and there are remnants of extensions that I’ve uninstalled. I might have to reinstall from scratch.

4

If you add TabMix Plus as an extension, you will be able to do all these kinds of settings from a UI.

5

Still doesn’t work. All of the other TabMix Plus options work, but no matter how I set the behavior for closing tabs, it still goes to the rightmost tab. Even if I just set it to go the leftmost tab. No effect.

6

Ok…I disabled all my add-ons (except TabMix Plus) and restarted and it worked fine, just like it’s supposed to.

So I reenabled my add-ons one by one to see which one was causing the problem. And now it still works, even with all the add-ons turned back on.

Go figure.

Thanks for the suggestions.