You should downgrade to 52 ESR, as it will be supported with security updates until May 2018. You can get it from here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/

As Firefox 56 is already insecure.

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 want to leave feedback for Firefox developers, you can go to the Firefox Help menu and select Submit Feedback... or use this link. Your feedback gets collected by a team of people who read it and gather data about the most common issues.

gtrichar said

It's essentially a completely different browser without TabMixPlus. I might as well use Chrome. For example, I don't see how anyone can manage having tabs that scroll on one line.

You can use custom style rules in a userChrome.css file to wrap your tabs to additional lines.

Could you make a full list of all the TMP features you consider essential? Then someone could find out how to replace as many of them as possible.

Mkll said

You should downgrade to 52 ESR, as it will be supported with security updates until May 2018. You can get it from here: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/organizations/all/ As Firefox 56 is already insecure.

How do I keep my current settings, extensions/addons, etc. while downgrading from 56 to 52 ESR?

Back up your profile! Go to about:profiles and then click the Open Folder button copy that profile folder to the desktop. Install 52 ESR with a new profile, then go back to about:profiles and click open folder again, now drag your backed up profile data into the new one. Then you are right as rain! If this helped please Mark as Solution!

Firefox comes in two or more folders on all computers. They are;

Maintenance: (Programs Folder) <Windows Only> Firefox itself: (Programs Folder) And two folders in the profile of each user on the computer for each Firefox profile for that user.

If you remove the Firefox folder, the user folders would not be affected.

Mkll said

Back up your profile! Go to about:profiles and then click the Open Folder button copy that profile folder to the desktop. Install 52 ESR with a new profile, then go back to about:profiles and click open folder again, now drag your backed up profile data into the new one. Then you are right as rain! If this helped please Mark as Solution!

Does that also work for downgrading from Firefox 57?

Can 52 ESR be installed on top of Firefox 56 or 57, or do those need to be uninstalled first?

Thanks

If you want, you can have more than one Firefox program. All you need to do is install the programs manually and place each in its own folder in the Programs Folder.

Each should also use its own profiles folder.

I don't want/need 2 different versions of Firefox on the same machine.

What I'm hoping to be able to do is to simply install 52 ESR on top of 46 (my machine) and 47 (my wife's machine) so that it REPLACES the newer version - is that possible, or must I first uninstall 46/47 if I don't want 2 different versions loaded?

Just download the Firefox you want. The full installer should replace the version you have with its own.

Hi guys, wow, thanks for the helpful replies! Seems like there is a great community here.

I might indeed go with 52 ESR, but I have a feeling that may just delay the inevitable, so I'm reconsidering how to proceed. Currently, I'm back on 57 and searching for solutions.

If anyone is wondering, the author of TabMixPlus has said that he might work on re-implementing it for 57, but it could take a long time. http://tabmixplus.org/ And yes, I have made a donation. :-)

I've started searching around for extensions and pre-cooked userChrome.css solutions. As jscher2000 suggested, here's a list of functionality I'd like to recreate:

(1) When closing a tab, focus shifts to the previously active one. This seems to be solved by the extension Tab Deque, probably others as well.

(2) Multi-row tab bar that scrolls vertically. I found this example code that makes the tabs multi-row: https://github.com/andreicristianpetcu/UserChrome-Tweaks/blob/09fa38a304af88b685f4086bc8ea9997dd7db0fd/tabs/multi_row_tabs_firefox_v57.css ...but the problem is that it grows to unlimited size, so the tabs can potentially fill the whole window. Under TabMixPlus, I had it configured to show three rows of tabs and scroll vertically with up/down arrows next to the tabs. If anyone can tell me how to modify userChrome.css to do that, I'd be much obliged. (I do have a CS background but I'd prefer not to invest a lot of time reading up on all the properties that can be customized.) Actually, even if your answer is "sorry, you definitely can't do that with userChrome.css", that could save me hours of research. I couldn't find any extensions that do this, but if you know of one, great!

(3) Remove the close-tab button from each tab.

(4) Put a single close-tab button somewhere near the new tab button.

(5) Shrink the tab width down to about the size of the icon, about 16 or 20 pixels. (The min-width setting in the code I linked above doesn't get them that small if I change 150px to 16px. Maybe removing the close-tab button is a prerequisite for getting them that small?)

(6) Make clicking on the active tab change focus to the previously active tab. (This is awesome for quickly switching between two tabs to compare something on them.)

(7) Different coloring for tabs that are not loaded yet. (Previously, I had dark grey for not loaded, light grey for loaded but not active, and white for the active tab.)

Any hints will be much appreciated!

Noticed missing a couple things from your list : https://mozilla.github.io/extension-finder/

https://www.howtogeek.com/333110/how-to-customize-firefox-quantum-and-remove-the-white-space-around-the-title-bar/ Here's a more comprehensive project which affects not only tabs but brings back the old "grid-style" options menu. https://github.com/axydavid/FirefoxUI/blob/master/README.md

It isn't completely possible to use the Australis design with Firefox 57, but depending on what you want, you might be able to customize the UI to look more like the old one: This project: https://github.com/wilfredwee/photon-australis lets you have the old tab bar appearance back in Firefox 57. You can remove the space around the address bar by right-clicking on the spaces, and choosing "remove from toolbar". Note the Black Theme is just a Example and can be found in Customize.

Please let us know if this solved your issue or if need further assistance.

Thanks pkshadow. I tried the userChrome files from those two projects. From what I can tell, the main difference is adding curves to the tabs, so those projects aren't doing a lot for me, but I will say it's very useful to see some examples of the options available to be configured.

This one line is golden for me though:

#tabbrowser-tabs .tabbrowser-tab .tab-close-button { display:none!important; }

That got rid of the close-tab buttons, so my issue #3 is solved!

I am still looking for #2, 4, 5, 6, 7. #2 would be the most critical, but unfortunately seems like the most advanced modification.

Today I also discovered that there are some options that can be configured by navigating to about:config. One of them is browser.tabs.tabMinWidth. I had high hopes for this, but unfortunately it doesn't seem to work. I'll continue searching.

More solutions!

(5) Shrink the tab width down to about the size of the icon:

.tabbrowser-tab {
    min-width: 40px !important;
}

This size seems to have the icon slightly off-center (to the left), but when I tried a little smaller, the tab appearance suffered. For example, mousing over the tab highlighted an area wider than the tab itself. So I'll stick with 40 pixels.

(7) Different coloring for tabs that are not loaded yet:

.tabbrowser-tab[pending="true"] {
    background: #000000!important;
}

Works for me for now, until I pick a nicer color scheme. Does anyone know the code for the grey color that is the default tab color in Firefox 57? I'd probably prefer to set that as the color for pending tabs and use a lighter grey for loaded tabs.

Still looking for solutions to #2, 4, 6. And I'd like a better solution to #1 because I've found it actually switches briefly to the wrong tab before switching to the previously active tab.

Round tabs ooops....

Ugh. So I've found a multi-row tab solution, but I'm not sure if I'm going to keep using it. It's scrollable, but not with the mouse wheel or with up/down arrows, but rather with a scroll bar that needs to be dragged. More importantly, tab dragging to rearrange is pretty messed up. Also, it seems to slow down tab switching pretty significantly.

For anyone interested, here it is:

.tabbrowser-tab,.tab-background {
   height:var(--tab-min-height);
}
.tab-stack {
   width: 100%;
}
#tabbrowser-tabs .scrollbox-innerbox {
   display: flex;
   flex-wrap: wrap;
   overflow-y: auto !important;
   min-height: var(--tab-min-height);
   max-height: calc(3*var(--tab-min-height)) !important; /* 3 rows */
}
#tabbrowser-tabs .arrowscrollbox-scrollbox {
   overflow: visible; 
   display: block;
}
#titlebar,#titlebar-buttonbox{
   height:var(--tab-min-height) !important;
}
#titlebar{
   margin-bottom:calc(var(--tab-min-height)*-1) !important;
}
#main-window[sizemode="maximized"] #titlebar{
   margin-bottom:calc(6px + var(--tab-min-height)*-1) !important;
}
#main-window[sizemode="maximized"] #TabsToolbar{
   margin-left:var(--tab-min-height);
}
#titlebar:active{
   margin-bottom:0 !important;
}
#titlebar:active #titlebar-content{
   margin-bottom:var(--tab-min-height) !important;
}
#tabbrowser-tabs .scrollbutton-up,#tabbrowser-tabs .scrollbutton-down,#alltabs-button,.tabbrowser-tab:not([fadein]){
   display: none;
}
/* This enables maximum width before scrollbar is shown */
#main-window[tabsintitlebar] #tabbrowser-tabs {
   -moz-window-dragging: no-drag;
}

This solution is from Redit: https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/comments/7dclp7/multirow_tabs_in_ff57/dpwsh6s/

I need to add a #8 as well: Opening links in new tabs should create the tabs at the end of the tab bar, not next to the current tab. It's solved by this:

Go to about:config in Firefox's address bar and click the warning to proceed. Search for browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and set to false by double clicking it.

I also found some commentary on bugzilla that appears to indicate that intercepting tab-clicks won't be allowed for webextensions and therefore I'm pretty worried that my precious #6 (make clicking on the active tab change focus to the previously active tab) won't be solvable. Not having that behavior is actually bothering me more than anything else lately. Feeling pretty depressed about the browsing experience I'm going to have to live with.

these are keeping track of development of coding for existing extensions yours maybe listed : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TFcEXMcKrwoIAECIVyBU0GPoSmRqZ7A0VBvqeKYVSww/edit#gid=0

http://arewewebextensionsyet.com/#addons

gtrichar said

I also found some commentary on bugzilla that appears to indicate that intercepting tab-clicks won't be allowed for webextensions and therefore I'm pretty worried that my precious #6 (make clicking on the active tab change focus to the previously active tab) won't be solvable. Not having that behavior is actually bothering me more than anything else lately.

This --

(6) Make clicking on the active tab change focus to the previously active tab. (This is awesome for quickly switching between two tabs to compare something on them.)

-- may not need to be integrated with the active tab if you don't mind clicking a toolbar button for it.