Tabs don't resize or scroll properly after closing them.
Since bug 465086 was "fixed", using tabs has become considerably slower. It was designed to help people that use the close button on the tab, but I don't. The entire tab is my close button, because I use the middle mouse button, scroll-click, mouse3.
When I wanted to close several tabs, I could close one and then go to each one in turn and close that. If they were all next to each other, I could scroll-click a few times and they'd be gone. I didn't need to make any mouse movements then either, and if there was a tab that needed closing that wasn't adjacent to one I was closing, moving the mouse a few pixels would bring that into focus.
These days, there's a blank space in the tab bar if I've closed any tabs. It serves no purpose whatsoever, and there could be other tabs there which would put more of them within easy reach.
In that picture I've just closed about ten tabs, which isn't unusual for me. There are at least 25 left in that window, and I can only see four of them.
Why is there no option to turn this off and put it back to how it was? I love Firefox, but if it stays like this I'm going to have to start looking at other options.
All Replies (4)
I'm trying to understand your question/request.
Say I start with a window that has two tabs open, and then I press Ctrl+t 20 times. I see the last bunch of tabs. If I middle click a tab to close it, I see two different behaviors depending on which tab I click first:
(1) Start with the last tab. After it closes, the previous tab slides over to the end under the mouse. Entire tab bar full until there are too few tabs left to fill it. I'm pretty sure this is not what you did.
(2) Start with a different tab. After it closes, if there are tabs to the right, they slide left. Once there are no more tabs to the right, the tabs start sliding from the left. All of these moves position the "next" tab under the mouse pointer where I closed the first tab.
In your screen shot, it appears you did this and stopped here. However, if at this point I move the mouse off the tab bar (i.e., toward the document), the tabs immediately spread out to fill the tab bar. Does that work for you?
Assuming we get the same thing, what is it that you don't like or would want changed?
I'd like the tabs to automatically and instantly scroll to fill the entire tab bar, like they used to before bug 465086 introduced Google Chrome-style tab closing.
When I need to close a lot of tabs, they're almost guaranteed to be related, and they'll have all been opened at about the same time. If they're at the end of the tab bar then I have the option of closing them starting from the last one so that it'll act the same way it used to. That's not the case a lot of the time.
I just want to be able to put it back how it was. A checkbox in the Options panel would be ideal, but a preference in about:config or an add-on would be fine. At this point, I'd even be okay with using a custom build of Firefox that has this behaviour reverted.
Maybe switch off tab animation.
You can try to set the pref browser.tabs.animate to false on the about:config page.
To open the about:config page, type about:config in the location (address) bar and press the "Enter" key, just like you type the url of a website to open a website.
If you see a warning then you can confirm that you want to access that page.
You can use the Filter bar at to top of the about:config page to locate a pref more easily.
Nope, no change after that. It seems to run rather deeper than an animation issue.