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How do I prevent tabs popping out into separate windows?

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A certain movement on my mousepad causes the current tab to pop out into its own window. I've never been able to perform this on purpose, it only ever happens by accident when I don't want it to. How do I turn this feature off?

A certain movement on my mousepad causes the current tab to pop out into its own window. I've never been able to perform this on purpose, it only ever happens by accident when I don't want it to. How do I turn this feature off?

All Replies (6)

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Try using the control panel to open your Mouse settings. Then if there is a tab on the very right that says "Device Settings," you can click Settings and change options for your mousepad. These options will be available if you use the widely adopted Synaptics mousepad, like my own.

If you want to change the settings in just Firefox, then do this: - Type in your Address/URL bar at the top, "about:config" (without the quotes). - Hit "I'll be careful, I promise!" - Search for: gesture - You can turn off any of those features that say "true" on the right just by double clicking and restarting.

Last, if you want to bring your window back to the other tabs, you can make that window smaller, press and hold its tab, drag it among the other tabs it was with before, then let go!

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A very slight movement (usually downward into the web page display area) will cause the tab to "tear off"/"tear away" into a new window. You can drag the tab back to the original window from the new window.

You can install this Add-on to stop the "tear off"/"tear away" behavior:


If this reply solves your problem, please click "Solved It" next to this reply when signed-in to the forum.

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Thanks for your help. On my synaptics device, the unwanted feature was disabled using Settings> Tapping >Tap and Drag, and unchecking "Tap again and hold to drag."

"Last, if you want to bring your window back to the other tabs, you can make that window smaller, press and hold its tab, drag it among the other tabs it was with before, then let go! " I don't understand what you mean by 'its tab' here. I've set up ff so single-tab windows don't display tabs, and I think that's the default, so I'm guessing you mean the taskbar tab. Do I have to ungroup all my ff windows on the taskbar to do this (Windows 7)? I'm guessing it's a windows set-up problem in that case.

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The default in Firefox is to display a tab, even if that's the only one for that Window. If you wanted to undo the way you said you have Firefox set up, which you don't have to, then you'd have to go to about:config, search for browser.tabs.autoHide, then change that to false by double clicking it.

Then when there are multiple tabs per window, you can drag the tab (from within firefox) to its own window, or drag it to another firefox window to the tab bar where there are tabs displayed. It'll then make that tab part of the window you dragged it to.

You said you fixed the problem though, so you shouldn't have to worry about that at all :P

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No, you can only drag a tab that got teared off back to the tab bar of the original window if the tab bar is visible. Otherwise you would first need to open a new (blank) tab to make the tab bar appear.

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By default, the tab bar is visible. Go to about:config, and search browser.tabs.autoHide. Then notice the status and the value of it. It'll say user set when your autoHide's value is true, and default when its value is false.

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