Am I the only one this is happening to? I always have several Firefox windows open at once. Sometimes when I have 5 or more open, it auto-hides some of them off of the taskbar. I can still bring the hidden ones up using Alt Tab.
A weird thing it does that seems to be connected to this is sometimes when it’s trying to load a page. It takes away the window I was looking at and brings up another. For a moment, when it’s about to flip windows on me, I’m not able to control the view with the mouse or keyboard. Something overrides my manual control.
I first noticed it running Firefox 1.0 on Windows XP. I just installed 1.5 and thought it might be fixed, but it happened again.
Just now it seemed to coincide with an obvious process taking place on my computer. I hear the sound of the hard drive. The thing whirrs and churns now and then for no apparent reason. Maybe the sound means the hard drive is being engaged for virtual memory. If there’s a sudden drain on memory, I take that to mean some process has started automatically, though there’s no indication what. Only one instance of these phenomena co-occurring isn’t enough to establish correlation, so I’ll pay attention to this the next time the windows start acting weird.
Are you sure it’s not just Windows XP grouping taskbar entries together when there are too many windows open?
If you want to test it, turn this behavior off by doing this:
*Close Firefox if it’s open
*Right-click on an empty blue part of the start menu
*Uncheck “Group similar taskbar buttons”
*Click OK
*Restart Firefox and open a bunch of windows to see if the same thing still happens
Sorry, I totally messed up the first time. Follow these steps instead:
*Close Firefox if it’s open
*Right-click on an empty blue part of the taskbar
*Click Properties
*Uncheck “Group similar taskbar buttons”
*Click OK
*Restart Firefox and open a bunch of windows to see if the same thing still happens
When I have multiple Firefox windows open on a Mac, opening a new tab will sometimes cause the application to incorrectly shift window focus rather than tab focus. There’s probably a minor coding error in the construction of the window/tab pointer lists.
Why do you have several windows, all running an instance of Firefox, open at once? Instead of a single window, with multiple tabs open in that window?
The ability to have multiple tabs, but only one instance of the browser using machine resources, is one of the real advantages I see in Firefox. Why do you want to use it in a way that negates those advantages?
Reply, I know about that, and this is different. It isn’t a case of stacking all the windows into one taskbar button, which isn’t a bug but a feature, as they say.
But when this stuff happens, the windows and their page titles disappear from the taskbar view entirely. Click on that stacked button to get the menu, some of them are displayed that way but others are hidden. This only happens once in a while, not even every day. Like I said, they’re still accessible using Alt Tab. It isn’t a big problem, since I know Alt Tab. But if a window disappeared and a user who didn’t know Alt Tab couldn’t figure out how to get it back, I bet it would annoy the living heck out of them.
t-bonham. I was waiting for someone to inquire why don’t I just use tabs.
Because otherwise how would I have found out this odd little bug in the software? Developers generally like when the public finds stuff for them to fix.
OK, the real answer is: I was used to doing it the old way. My motivation in switching to Firefox wasn’t to get the slick new tabbed browsing experience (which I didn’t even know about), but to avoid the security holes in IE. I just recently found out that tabs are supposed to be this superior new way to browse. Maybe by now I’m used to seeing solutions to problems I hadn’t known existed.
By the way, I still haven’t figured out how to turn on the tabs to function automatically. Just now I went into the Tools>Options menu to set the tabs to display. I found it already set up that way: “Open links from another application in a new tab in the most recent window” is checked. However, no tabs in sight. SDMB links always spawn new Firefox windows for me instead of tabs.
Is there a “Force links that open in new windows to…” option? If so, set it to “a new tab”. If not, get the Tab Mix Plus extension. IMHO, once you get used to the tabs, you’ll never go back to the old way.
Doesn’t make a difference. No matter how many Firefox windows you have open, they all run in a single process. I tend to use multiple windows, each with several tabs, to keep different things organized. I probably have forty or fifty tabs open in three or four windows at any given time.
I use tabs a lot, but if for example I have the straight dope up, I’ll have half a dozen tabs open for it. If I do a google search, I’ll open it in a new window, or maybe I’ll have yahoo games or something up in a new window. I rarely have more than a couple of windows up.
If there are a lot of other things open as well (word, maybe some other applications) then I get essentially the same problem as the OP. Some, or all, of the firefox windows disappear from the task bar. If I click on the firefox window (which is usually still visible somewhere on my screen) then it pops back up on the task bar.
I never thought of it as an auto hide feature. I’ve always thought of it as more of an “oops I lost track of that one” kind of bug.
Firefix doesn’t seem to be the open gateway to hell for viruses and trojans that IE is, but firefox also isn’t anywhere near bug free in my experience. Considering how much I paid for it though, I guess I can’t complain too much.
Excalibre, just now I had only three Firefox windows open. That does not cause the stacking effect. Each window has its individual button. Except that only two of them were there!
I don’t have more than one window visible at any time. My habit is to maximize every window. Whatever I have up at the moment gets my unidivded attention. I use Alt Tab like a channel changer. Either that, or using only partially wide windows that overlap one another as Excalibre said, means they won’t get lost.
Again, there seem to be computer memory shortage issues associated with the phenomenon. In the morning when I wake up my computer from its sleep, it’s so groggy after I tell it to rise and shine. It tends to run slow for some minutes until it starts functioning normally. Any window that hasn’t been recently active is very sluggish to return to activity. While this is happening I can hear the hard drive grinding away, and the little LED on the front of the computer lights up and flickers like a candle in the wind. That’s when the windows start disappearing.
Yeah, Firefox tends to have memory leaks. If you keep it open for too long with too many tabs open, it’ll start eating memory. Which is an annoyance, but I suspect that if I used it in a reasonable way - keeping a moderate number of tabs open - it wouldn’t be a problem.
I frequently use multiple windows. I use different windows to group tabs related to specific tasks.
Example: I have four tabs open in the current window, all related to research on the book I’m working on. I take a lunch break to browse SDMB. I open a new window, which will soon have its own half-dozen tabs. My wife suggests going out to a movie, so I open a new window with its own set of tabs to look up movie listings, pick a restaurant, and get directions. I close that whole window to go back to SDMB. When it’s time to get back to work, one click closes all of the SDMB stuff and brings back the work window with its tabset.
I used to have this problem where clicking a link would open a new window, vs a new tab even though the new tab option was checked under options. I went through and downloaded a bunch of extensions and now everything works correctly.
One of the following may help??? :Tab Catalog, Tab X, Tab Browser Preferences.
Tab Mix Plus is pretty solid for configuring all those little doodads. You can find it by opening up your extensions and clicking on the “find more extensions” link.
But the thing that puzzles me the most is how the wndows sometimes flip around without warning. It happens when I’m in the active window and starting to load a page. Suddenly the activeness is taken away from the loading one and a different window comes to the fore, for no apparent reason. Again, this happens when memory shortage is acting up as a performance issue.
Are you sure it’s not because a page in the other window has finished loading? Firefox moves the active page to the front sometimes and it’s seriously annoying - I wouldn’t be in another tab if it was vital I knew the second the page loaded, jerks!
I beleive there is a config option that can be set to change this, if you want. It’s not one of the easily changeable ones, but must be done manually via the config file.
Ask on the Firefox board, and someone there can probably give you details.
I thought of that as a possible explanation, because I knew about the flip-to-newly-loaded-page [del]bug[/del] feature. The weird thing is… it also happens in reverse. What I’m describing is: I just started to load a page, but that goes away and a window that already finished loading a while ago, and had just been sitting around inactive, jumps up for no apparent reason. Unless some genius at Firefox thought “People might get bummed out waiting for a slow-loading page. Hey, I know! I’ll give 'em a complete one to look at while they’re waiting!”
But the other thing drives me crazy, I’m typing in one window, suddenly I’m typing in the wrong window. Whoops. I’m inadvertently adding lines of lesbian erotic poetry to a letter to my congressman. Well heck, maybe it would do him some good. Vote for same-sex marriage, dude.
We could start a thread in MPSIMS for bizarre sentences produced when this happens.
Slowly add the beaten egg whites to her lips lasciviously wrapped around the melted butter
Back to the OP issue: You want to hear something even weirder? Now I have one Firefox window open, with six tabs. Just now the entire Firefox presence vanished from the taskbar. It was nowhere to be seen at all! It’s playing hide-and-go-seek.
