When I start up my browser (normally Firefox), I normally open 4 tabs in a row. It often happens to me that I will accidentally slide or click my mouse/cursor and one of the tabs will separate itself from the other four into a separate session (in other words, it no longer displays beside the three others but you have to click on the Firefox icon on the bottom toolbar, which becomes doubled up, in order to access it).
I hope I have explained this clearly. I don’t know where exactly on the window my clicking causes me to do this (as I said, it’s an accidental click of the mouse that does it; the problem has been aggrevated recently by a malfunction of my mouse pad), but one way or another, I don’t want this to happen; it’s annoying. I literally wish the browser did not give me the option of separating exiting internet window tabs from each other in this way. Is there any way of disabling this option, and if not, could I at least know where exactly on the window/window tab it is I click/swipe that causes the window to separate from the rest of the tab line?
Just to be clear, that page says that it’s not something you can fix. At least not directly with firefox, I’m sure there’s add-ons that’ll do it. That page just shows you how to force new windows to spawn as new tabs instead. Not stop FF from creating new windows when it thinks you’re doing it on purpose.
I’d love to be able to stop it from happening as well. Like the OP and the OP of that question, I tend to bump my touchpad as well and it nearly always has unwanted consequences, that being one of them.
Note you can easily undo that mistake (at least in Chrome; I don’t have FF to test).
Just grab the tab that is now off in a window by itself, and drag that tab into the row of tabs on the browser window it escaped from. It’ll rejoin it’s siblings there. You can put it between any 2 existing tabs, or by dropping it over on the far left or right, make it the first or last tab in the row.
That’s true, but it does tell you how to get the tab back into the window you want it in. This happened last night to me. So this was worth my Dope subscription.
It seems to me that Chrome adds a bit more inertia than Firefox. I never accidentally tear out a tab in Chrome, as it takes a bit of time and movement. But, in Firefox (at least, on Linux) it’s easy to just slightly move the mouse while selecting a tab, and it will tear out.
I normally use Firefox, and I had the same issue – sometimes my mouse/touchpad behavior as I moved between tabs was something that Firefox interpreted as, “oh, you want to make this tab into its own window!” (Which, honestly, I never actually want to do. :P)
As I discovered when I looked into “how to turn that off,” I discovered that you couldn’t turn it off in Firefox. I found a third-party add-on which disabled that feature, but Firefox increasingly flagged that add-on as a security risk, and I finally ditched it.
In Chrome on Win10 you’ve got to slide the tab vertically until it’s fully above or fully below the row of tabs. Only then will it tear out. If you drag it purely left or right to re-order the tabs you need to pull it more than half the tab-width from where it is towards where you want it to go.
Only somebody who has a very hard time controlling click-drag (or is using a flaky trackpad) would make that goof very often after they know what causes it.
I fiddled a bit with FF on Win10 and it was a little more sensitive vertically. The visual cues that you’re about to tear the tab are much more subtle than Chrome’s.
I was just glad years ago when I learned that hitting escape, while holding down a mouse button, essentially releases the mouse button without completing the action. In this case, if you happen to catch yourself ‘starting’ to tear out a tab, that is, the tab is now unpinned from the top of the browser and connected to the cursor, hitting escape (before letting go of the mouse button) will put the tab back where it was.
Interesting. Does the other standard action work? In much of Windows, clicking the other mouse button while dragging will cancel a drag.
I can’t test it myself because my new computer’s name brand power supply failed (!) and I’m stuck using an old computer with a pen drive Linux, where tearing out the tabs on Firefox is instant (likely due to my window manager not being officially supported).
In Win10 with my particular mouse the escape key cancels drag.
Clicking the other mouse button does not cancel drag in any of the several MSFT and non-MSFT apps I tested it with.
Although the more I fiddle with it that seems to be an artifact of my physical mouse which has a single rocking surface for the buttons. It seems it’s mechanically impossible to click both sides simultaneously.
Just tried a different mouse with distinct physical buttons Still no drag cancel effect in Win10.
I brought this issue up today to an ESL student of mine who’s in IT. He sent me a link to instructions on disabling this feature in firefox. I tried it and it works. The link is here.
Ah, the ever-popular “about:config” page. So much power, so little documentation. All the stuff that Mozilla wants to be able to tweak but doesn’t want you to.