Where did you install Firefox from? Help Mozilla uncover 3rd party websites that offer problematic Firefox installation by taking part in our campaign. There will be swag, and you'll be featured in our blog if you manage to report at least 10 valid reports!

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

Hierdie gesprek is in die argief. Vra asseblief 'n nuwe vraag as jy hulp nodig het.

Thunderbird's focus shifts to the wrong tab

  • 2 antwoorde
  • 1 het hierdie probleem
  • 3 views
  • Laaste antwoord deur Cara_M

more options

I don't generally like tabs. I'm more of a "windowing" person. But even if I resign myself to using tabs in Thunderbird, they're not working very well.

I use search a lot. I type in a search term and (thanks to an add in) get back a LIST of emails that I want to read. I also use threaded conversations so, when I double-click on the resulting list to open an email (because I prefer to open and not read in the message pane), I often get MORE than one email (from that conversation) opened in a tab. So I go to the last opened tab, and hit the DELETE key to delete it -- and Thunderbird jumps me back to the Inbox tab, which may be many many tabs to the left of the next email that I want to review.

Pain in the butt. Set the focus to the NEXT MOST RECENT tab (the one immediately to the left of the one I was just in).

Any add-ons that might do this now?

I don't generally like tabs. I'm more of a "windowing" person. But even if I resign myself to using tabs in Thunderbird, they're not working very well. I use search a lot. I type in a search term and (thanks to an add in) get back a LIST of emails that I want to read. I also use threaded conversations so, when I double-click on the resulting list to open an email (because I prefer to open and not read in the message pane), I often get MORE than one email (from that conversation) opened in a tab. So I go to the last opened tab, and hit the DELETE key to delete it -- and Thunderbird jumps me back to the Inbox tab, which may be many many tabs to the left of the next email that I want to review. Pain in the butt. Set the focus to the NEXT MOST RECENT tab (the one immediately to the left of the one I was just in). Any add-ons that might do this now?

All Replies (2)

more options

The Global Search results page has a button labelled "open email as list" which displays its findings in a conventional Thunderbird listings window. That window has never given me any issues with unwanted opening of multiple messages. So your addon may not be really necessary.

There again, I use the message pane below the mailbox listing almost exclusively. I don't see the attraction in all the extra clicks involved with opening messages in tabs or even their own windows. And if I'm opening messages in a conversation or thread, I specifically want to see their temporal/logical relationships. Viewing messages from a thread or conversation in their own separate tabs or windows just isn't helpful, IMHO.

Like you, I dislike tabs, at least in the context of email. I don't see tabs as appropriate to email workflow, and Thunderbird's tabs in particular are poorly and incompletely implemented.

There is a setting in Tools|Options to set Thunderbird to open messages in windows rather than tabs, and you can tell it whether to reuse a single window or use multiple windows. Have you explored these options? (Not that I'd consider a plethora of windows any more manageable than a long row of tabs!)

more options

Zenos -- your suggestion to look into Tools > Options again helped me stumble on an extension that I was using that I thought was helping me -- except that I had its settings wrong.

It was the reason that the focus was shooting over to the far left, instead of the immediate left, and I can now ESC out of a tab and be moved into the next-most-recent.

Thanks