How do I prevent tabs from gaining focus, AND prevent them from loading, on both startup and when the tab is created?
Greetings!
I've been looking for a setting that used to exist, and now doesn't seem to anymore.
I have two problems:
1) Firefox opens all of the tabs I used last time I had the application open every time I start, causing huge latency between "Start Firefox" and "everything is ready to use", and
2) Firefox loads and leaves active (it seems) every single tab and window. This means any page with any kind of javascript or other script continues to be active. By the time I have about 30 minutes of productivity started, FireFox gets very laggy as it's using multiple gigabytes of RAM. It then hangs, and sometimes if I open a new window it'll become responsive again, but most of the time if I open a new window, it'll either crash, or get worse after about 10 seconds of use on the new blank tab.
I have 8 Gigs of RAM, a brand new fresh install of a corporate and fast SDE configured HP Pro Book. It's fast. Don't ask me about the performance of my computer, as I'm sure if you're trying to answer we both make about the same amount of money at <insert IT company here>, and if we had time we could probably create a new browser.
Sorry for the previous paragraph, I find it necessary to avert potentially useless comments about "why" and "but your computer" and "I don't wanna answer that". If you fall into that category, then leave. This isn't BSD, it's FireFox.
Now, onto the desired end-result:
Further explanation:
I'm a system engineer and in my investigations will often open dozens to a few hundred tabs at once. Yes you read that correctly, a dozens to a few hundred tabs at once. This kills FireFox, and thusly kills Windows when they are all trying to be loaded at once.
What's worse, when I try to reload FireFox, it tries to open them all at once upon startup. Crash. Start Firefox. Crash. Start FireFox, open Windows Task Manager, Kill FireFox. Start FireFox, crash report and list of re-startable tabs. It Started though, don't open anything for fear of the app crashing. Defeats the purpose.
What I want is:
1) Prevent FF from opening previous windows / tabs at startup, EVER, and if it does open any windows / tabs at startup, prevent them from loading the URL stored for that window / tab until the user manually physically clicks on the window / tab. (tab gain focus)
And
2) Prevent FF from conducting the HTTP request for new tabs and windows until the user manually physically clicks on the window / tab. (tab gain focus)
This should be relatively simple to do, but doesn't seem to be. I've tried probably all of the extensions and addons out there, and nothing seems to allow for this desired behavior anymore.
If I could use tree-style tabs with Chrome, I would uninstall Firefox.
If IE / Spartan didn't still suck, I'd still never use them.
I'm stuck dealing with FF crashes multiple times daily, and it's really impeeding productivity.
Thanks!
-Doc
Alle Antworten (3)
Did you verify by starting Firefox in Safe Mode that one of your extensions isn't causing this problem?
Ubuntu has the habit of making a lot of modification to Firefox and usually adds a few extensions. If the "When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately" setting in "Options/Preferences > General : Tabs" isn't working then this is likely caused by an extension.
dehvokahn said
What I want is: 1) Prevent FF from opening previous windows / tabs at startup, EVER, and if it does open any windows / tabs at startup, prevent them from loading the URL stored for that window / tab until the user manually physically clicks on the window / tab. (tab gain focus)
On the first point, this is close: you can set Firefox to start up with a blank tab or home page AND for the post-crash scenario, have Firefox show the "This is embarrassing" page that allows you either to choose specific windows and tabs to restore, or to simply start a new session. If you haven't seen that screen before, it's very handy. To try that out:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered
(3) Double-click the browser.sessionstore.max_resumed_crashes and edit the value from 1 to 0 (that's a zero) and OK the change.
On the second point, there is no built-in setting for not loading ANY tabs until a window is physically activated when restoring a session. However, by default, Firefox should only reload the one tab that was active in each window. I'm not sure why yours is not working that way. Could you check:
(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.
(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered
(3) If the browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand preference is bolded and "user set" to false, double-click it to restore the default value of true.
Did you want to share any information with us about the crashes? Obviously reducing crashes would help with the session resumption issue.
If you are getting the Mozilla Crash Reporter form, your Firefox may have logged some data that would help track down the cause of the problem. You can submit that data to Mozilla and share it with forum volunteers to see whether it points to the solution. Please check the last section of the support article "Firefox Crashes" for steps to get those crash report IDs from the about:crashes page, and then post some of the recent ones here.