Closing tabs in Firefox 2
Thomas recently compiled Firefox 2 here on DAIMI, so I gave it a go. My impressions so far have been good overall: switching between tabs is significantly faster than before as is scrolling through, say, The Planet. The machines here only have 512 MiB of RAM, and Firefox 2 seems to handle that better than before. The built-in spell checker is also very nice, but why did we have to wait until 2006 (almost 2007) before browsers shipped with a spell checker by default? That’s just ridiculous!
There is one change in Firefox 2 which I don’t like at all — they changed the close buttons on the tabs. Now there are individual close buttons on each tab. This is apparently a great achievement, they even mention is as one of the new great features of Firefox?! I find it truly annoying to have to search for the button I want to push when I want to close a tab. With Firefox 1.5 the button was always in the same spot so I could click it several times in a row to close several tabs quickly. With Firefox 2 I have to move the mouse around when closing multiple tabs.
Luckily it’s easy to change: open the URL about:config and find the setting browser.tabs.closeButtons. Change the value to 3 and you’re back to the sane pre-Firefox 2 setting.
Mikkel:
Now that was really useful. I’m going to do that right away when I get home :)
5 December 2006, 11:31 amRobert:
I use both Firefox and Internet Explorer as both have their relative advantages. Firefox is much faster and organises some things better. However, amazingly enough, there are still some very basic html items they cannot display. In particular, table borders. I wonder when these basic shortfalls will be cleared up.
I also need both as a web designer, because sites designed for IE often display poorly in Firefox due to its code display limitations, so need to confirm templates in both.
30 December 2006, 2:13 amLynn Ludwick:
How do I get to URL about:config??? I do NOT want to close all the tabs at once, thus losing my Email. grrr
2 June 2007, 3:33 pmMartin Geisler:
You simply type “about:config” into your address bar :-)
2 June 2007, 6:38 pmUdayangani:
I tried many times using this code but I couldn’t close the Firefox tab window,please help me to close the Firefox window tab
30 October 2007, 11:03 am