Hello,

In Firefox 23, as part of an effort to simplify the firefox options set and protect users from unintentially damaging their Firefox _{and prepare for a planned redesign of the browser}, the option to hide the tab bar was removed.

Fortunately, this can easily be resolved if you desire the keep tabs hidden. You can install "Hide tab bar with one tab", an extension hosted on Mozilla's add-ons site, which will restore the ability to hide the tab bar.

Thank you and I hope this helps!

There is another "thread" with same response about installing "Hide Tab Bar"

Installing it DID NOT solve problem!

Why does FF constantly put something in an update that users don't have option of not using?

I DON'T WANT TABS! I DON'T LIKE TABS!

How hard is that to understand?

Get rid of this before I give up and go to another browser which might give me less headaches.

I tried installing this add-on again. This time it worked.

Still doesn't absolve FF of boneheaded decision to put in this new TAB bar w/o making it an option.

I'm glad to hear that installing the extension a second time did the trick.

The people who answer questions here, for the most part, are other Firefox users volunteering their time (like me), not Mozilla employees or Firefox developers. If you're interested, the background for this decision is explained here:

• Bug 855370 - Remove the ability to not "Always show the tab bar"

Additional comments have been disabled in the bug report. If you want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. (You'll need to be on the latest version of Firefox to submit feedback). Your feedback gets collected at http://input.mozilla.org/, where a team of people read it and gather data about the most common issues.

Well, it looks like I need to find another browser. Apparently future changes for Firefox are not being done in the best interest of the users, but in the best interest of the developers.

Had I wanted to support that attitude, I would have stayed with Internet Exploder.

Damn shame. It was a really nice product.

Wow, reading that bug thread, Josiah Bruner is an arrogant turd in serious need of an administrative beating. How dare he pull that crap, "...in this day and age..."

Thank you Alice.

However, as one poster in the bugzilla thread pointed out, whoever decides on what changes should or should not be implemented must realize that not every FF user is either tech-savy or can appreciate need for a change.

This change came unasked for and thrust into an update which led to me and no doubt countless others scrambling to figure out what was going on.

And Bruner (?)'s rationale for change didn't convince me --- even if I could figure out what he was talking about.

Point is, unless it's a critical upgrade that has to be made or FF will explode into ether, leave the user with options and leave standard features as they are. Better to do that than unleash torrents of outrage and threats (actual or implied) of dropping FF

Please add the option to disable Tabs back. There are many users who are not using space wasting Tabs.

There is more to this than one simple option being violated. I have been around the software industry for 30 years. When objective logical decisions are being replaced with elitism and arrogant driven decisions, those products eventually failed.

We seem to be stuck in a period of time where changes are being made without regard to the users who actually use the products. Many examples of this exist today. Clumsy is replacing clean. Awkward seems to be the new way of doing things. Yet, those making those changes have convinced themselves it is a good thing.

In software, on occasion, there are times when things are just right. When things work seamlessly they should not be discounted for the sake of something different.

As a developer, I loathe change for the sake of change. Unfortunately, I am in the minority. Of course, ask any of the kids today, and I have become irrelevant due to my philosophies. They have convinced themselves of their own superiority and chose to ignore history.

I hate to see this happen. Good browsers are getting difficult to find.

I can't believe I read this under comment 14 by Justin Dolske of that “bug 855370” thread.

“Improvements like this are exactly the kind of thing that helped Mozilla go from zero to hundreds of millions of users over the past decade.”

I have used this alternative to Internet Explorer from the day I started on the internet, I guess around 1994/95? It was called Netscape Navigator in those days and it got sold off to AOL. Netscape carried on two versions (one AOL and the other for everyone else) It was “improvements like this” that destroyed Netscape and made it entirely unusable which is what bred Mozilla and then Firefox to step forward from the crash and burn of Netscape.

To claim someone is going to ruin their browser by having this feature available is ridiculous. Ship it with tabs and they'll never know the option to rid themselves of a single tab is even there.

Btw, in that “bugfix” thread the claim was made the ability to remove the tabs caused a particular theme to move the placement of a button and that was the rationale for removing the ability to rid ourselves of tabs. That sounds more like a theme problem than a tabs removal problem.

“While I'm here, I'll also say that for a while now it's been weird, opening a new window flashes open for a moment and then flips back to my original window. It makes multi window browsing difficult, sometimes.”

I have complained about this also several times. THE reason I use Firefox is the option to use “show all bookmarks” in a separate open window. When I click a bookmark from that open bookmarks window it will open a browser window and start to load a page but then jump back to the bookmarks window forcing me to then click on the new window to see it. I don't know if this is Windows or FF causing this but its extremely irritating. The day they drop the ability to use bookmarks in this way is the day I will have no need to choose FF over IE. They've already taken half a step on the way to destruction by limiting the size of the window that opens when you save a bookmark. I have 18 years of building my bookmarks and my filing system is rather large and complicated, scrolling through the little window is not progress.

Firefox has been heading in a very bad direction lately... The interface flat-out lies about certain things (as I pointed out here: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=901397 ) and they keep removing basic options that have no negative effect on anything, all for the sake of idiots. "Just install this extension to get the feature back", no thanks: more extensions that modify FF itself = more dependency on something that could vanish at any time, which is what's happening with FF's own features. I thought FF would be more reliable than that.

bsmith1199, rest assured that some of us "kids" aren't that retarded and agree with everything you're saying. Too bad we're a minority indeed, good software is getting very hard to find nowadays. I've noticed that very small, modest freeware devs are often the best of the bunch: Nirsoft, Softwareok, LTRData, Foobar, etc. Big companies just make too many bad decisions, being forced by marketing strategies to appeal to the dumb masses and all that.

Hi myfeetstink and dumbitdown, regarding this --

“While I'm here, I'll also say that for a while now it's been weird, opening a new window flashes open for a moment and then flips back to my original window. It makes multi window browsing difficult, sometimes.”

-- there's a good chance this is a Flash Player plugin bug that kicks in when you do not have Flash running in any tab and you open a new window to a page that does use Flash. The problem and known workarounds are described in this recent thread: Opening New Windows and Shockwave Flash. Spread the word.

The only reason -- literally, the only reason -- that I'm still using Firefox instead of Chrome is because I can turn off those God-smurfed tabs.

Why is it so hard to understand that a large minority of people simply don't like tabbed browing? And more importantly, what is there to gain by trying to force people to switch to it? I prefer to ALT-TAB between windows because it's not only something I'm used to, but it's consistent with the rest of the way my operating system works. My OS is also really convenient in that it already gives me a tab bar; you may have heard of it. It's called the Task Bar. Yeah. So why the smurf do I need a second one that isn't integrated into my system, isn't even remotely intuitive, and is a complete eye sore and waste of screen real estate?

I'm not asking for tabbed browsing to be removed. I doubt anyone is. But for smurf's sake, don't take away options from people. Especially ones that, even if someone new to using a computer accidentally turns off, doesn't break anything because they still have their Task Bar and ALT-TABBing available.

Infuriating!

I agree with everything Grim_Fandango says except there are two reasons I haven't switched to Chrome: I don't like tabs and I like being able to choose what to do with cookies on the fly and per. Chrome requires that one either turn off all cookies or accept all until browser is closed.

I suppose that's something else Justin Dolske thinks we'll not need anymore, eh?

What the hell? I just discovered that one can't turn JavaScript off anymore!

What the hell is going on over at Mozilla?

The option to disable JavaScript was also removed from the Firefox Options window, and was mentioned in the Firefox 23 Release Notes. Related bug, which includes the background:

• Bug 851702 - Remove "Enable JavaScript" checkbox from Prefs

See also http://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill for more information about the reasons for the removal of certain Firefox options.

You can still access the option to enable and disable JavaScript from about:config or by installing an add-on.

about:config

1. In the address bar, type "about:config" (with no quotes), and press Enter.
2. Click "I'll be careful, I promise"
3. In the search bar, search for "javascript.enabled" (with no quotes).
4. Right click the result named "javascript.enabled" and click "Toggle". JavaScript is now disabled.

To Re-enable JavaScript, repeat these steps.

Add-ons:

• No-Script (to disable JavaScript on a per page basis, as required)
• QuickJava (to easily disable and enable JavaScript, automatic loading of images, and other content).

The Advanced JavaScript Settings were also removed from the Options window. The following support forum thread (Post 8/6/13 by jscher2000) has the corresponding Advanced JavaScript Settings that can be set in about:config :

• /questions/967108 Changes in Firefox 23 - not for the better

I like tabs but only when I want them. It does not make sense to have only one page open and have it tabbed. How difficult it is to know and choose a page when you have only one page open in browser? I do not like extensions. They slow down opening of Firefox.

I have been using Firefox since its initial release 10 years ago as Phoenix and stayed with it through many disappointments. May be its time to part our ways. Either restore the 'tab not always open automatically' option or see many of us leave Firefox and making Microsoft and Google very happy.

I already have switched... Luckily there are many nice Browsers out there, Midori for example allows me to do all the things Firefox deletes in V23 up to Australis.

Was a very simple Choice for me. And i will for sure not the last user you will lose!