How to view all open tabs?
plabord
topic after doing a brief search.
I've been away from Firefox for awhile now, and it looks like they've
changed how the tabs show in the window. Previously when opening new
ones, their size would progressively shrink to display all of them, but
now their size remains constant and one has to click on an arrow to
make all the tabs slide left and right to see the hidden ones.
Although I can see how the new way is useful if one has a truly huge
number of tabs open, I find it clunky for normal use (10-15 tabs open).
Is there a way to change this back to the view-all mode? I've not been
able to find it if there is one. Thanks for any help.
Tony Mechelynck
It has never been possible to always "view all tabs" on Firefox without
extensions. On previous versions, when there were more than (maximized with
the resolution I use) 32 tabs or so, only the first ones were displayed on the
tab bar and the rest were "hidden" to the right. On Firefox 2, the tab bar is
scrollable; but the default "minimum tab width" is IMHO much too big.
With "plain vanilla" Firefox 2.0, you can adjust the minimum width of tabs by
means of the preference browser.tabs.tabminWidth in about:config
For finer control over what happens when there are more tabs than can fit
horizontally on the tab bar, I recommend the "Tab Mix Plus" extension.
Best regards,
Tony.
FoxWolfie Galen
> Sorry if this has been asked before, but I can't find anything on this
> topic after doing a brief search.
>
> I've been away from Firefox for awhile now, and it looks like they've
> changed how the tabs show in the window. Previously when opening new
> ones, their size would progressively shrink to display all of them, but
> now their size remains constant and one has to click on an arrow to
> make all the tabs slide left and right to see the hidden ones.
>
> Although I can see how the new way is useful if one has a truly huge
> number of tabs open, I find it clunky for normal use (10-15 tabs open).
> Is there a way to change this back to the view-all mode? I've not been
> able to find it if there is one. Thanks for any help.
You can get close, but not quite, to what version 1.5.0.x could do.
Type about:config in the location bar
Search for a line that says browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
Double click on that line and change the value to 0
Close and restart the browser
This will allow the tabs to shrink to around 33 pixels each before the
arrows appear. Any value smaller than 33 seems to be treated as 33, at
least with the default theme.
The tabs will not shrink as small as they did in version 1.5.0.7, no matter
what I try, but this change does allow me to have 28 open at once, instead
of just 5, before those darned arrows appear.
I often did long eBay searches and had up to 65 tabs loaded at once on one
screen, using version 1.5.0.7. Now I've learned to limit myself to fewer
than 28 at once because of the limit in version 2.0. Those tab arrows and
the close buttons on every tab were the two first things I had to correct
before I could even hope to use the browser. Luckily, the close buttons
were totally correctable, but the arrow solution was only a compromise.
Those arrows don't work too well for people with poor motor coordination,
which applies to about 15 million Americans.
I hope the developers will consider putting settings for these things into
the options for the next version. Anything that has to do with ergonomics
and accessability should always be an easy choice, without the need for
people to go into the about:config settings.
Tony Mechelynck
[...]
> I often did long eBay searches and had up to 65 tabs loaded at once on one
> screen, using version 1.5.0.7. Now I've learned to limit myself to fewer
> than 28 at once because of the limit in version 2.0. Those tab arrows and
> the close buttons on every tab were the two first things I had to correct
> before I could even hope to use the browser. Luckily, the close buttons
> were totally correctable, but the arrow solution was only a compromise.
> Those arrows don't work too well for people with poor motor coordination,
> which applies to about 15 million Americans.
>
> I hope the developers will consider putting settings for these things into
> the options for the next version. Anything that has to do with ergonomics
> and accessability should always be an easy choice, without the need for
> people to go into the about:config settings.
With the Tab Mix Plus extension, you have a bunch of tab-related settings in a
nice UI, which can be invoked from a button at the top of the "Tabs" tab in
Firefox 2's Preferences UI, or from a submenu of the "Tools" menu, in addition
to the usual "Options" button in the Extensions Manager. Among many other
things, you can set the minimum tab width as low as 22, and you have the
choice of the following behaviours when there are too many tabs for a single
tab bar:
- overflow onto several lines of tabs (you specify the maximum number)
- scroll horizontally without buttons
- scroll horizontally with buttons
The position of the close-tab buttons is also settable from that same UI.
Best regards,
Tony.
Mortman
About.com comes up. This is, apparently, not the page you are referring
to. Any thoughts?
Tony Mechelynck
No.
This might be the result of auto-filling your Location Bar from history but
it's not the page y mean. You must make sure that the Location Bar contains
about:config
and nothing else (no http:// -- no .com -- no nothing). Then hit Enter. The
page which comes up has a fill-in bar labeled "filter" at top, and then an
alphabetical list of system settings and their values, like this
Tony Mechelynck
No, it is not.
This might be the result of auto-filling your Location Bar from history but
it's not the page I mean. You must make sure that the Location Bar contains
about:config
and nothing else (no http:// -- no .com -- no nothing). Then hit Enter or
click the Go button. The page which comes up has a fill-in bar labeled
"Filter" at top, and then an alphabetical list of system settings and their
values, like this:
about_about.aboutWindowTarget default integer 1
accessibility.accesskeycausesactivation user set boolean false
accessibility.browsewithcaret user set boolean true
accessibility.tabfocus default integer 7
accessibility.tabfocus_applies_to_xul user set boolean true
accessibility.typeaheadfind user set boolean true
etc.
Best regards,
Tony.
Mortman
Thanx Tony. Apparently it was autofilling but its ok now.
Don't laugh but in trying to get the url to work properly, I
accidentally deleted the original message that explained how to tweak
the settings in about:config in order to reduce the width of the tabs so
that more tabs would be visible. I guess I'm just having a bad day.
If anyone has that information I would appreciate passing it on again.
Thank you.
FoxWolfie Galen
> Thanx Tony. Apparently it was autofilling but its ok now.
> Don't laugh but in trying to get the url to work properly, I
> accidentally deleted the original message that explained how to tweak
> the settings in about:config in order to reduce the width of the tabs so
> that more tabs would be visible. I guess I'm just having a bad day.
> If anyone has that information I would appreciate passing it on again.
Here is that setting again:
Type about:config in the location bar
Search for browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
David McRitchie
"FoxWolfie Galen" <ga...@velocity.net> wrote=..
One such message said they would not reduce below 33, all I
know is they're a lot wider than before but I had run across this
extension, if it does better let us know, as much as I hate the
fat tabs, I probably would still not use the extension. The tabs
in the picture still look fat, so I don't think he really found anything.
FaviconizeTab , by Kyosuke Takayama
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3780/
Mortman
check the tab width in FF2 again. I kept opening tabs and saw that after
5 tabs were set up, any additional tabs "automatically" caused the tabs
to change size to accommodate the total number. Since this is what I was
trying to accomplish in the first place, I see no reason to make any
changes.
Thank you to all who responded.
Tony Mechelynck
100 is IMHO a high value: assuming a display resolution of 1368x1024, only 13
tabs (at most) can be visible together; at 1024x768 it's only 10 tabs. After
that, I can think of the following solutions (several of which can be used
together):
- a) let the tabs scroll laterally into and out of view (built into Fx 2.0,
impossible with plain-vanilla 1.5).
- b) reduce the tabMinWidth to accomodate more tabs
- c) add an entry in userChrome.css to reduce the minimum width even further
than the "normal" minimum: this way I've brought it down to 16 pixels which is
about the width of a favicon, and I can get 60 tabs or so on one row (at
resolution 1024x768), plus the close-tab button at far right.
- d) install Tab Mix Plus to allow more options such as flowing tabs (onto
more than one horizontal rows of tabs).
Best regards,
Tony.
FoxWolfie Galen
Can you post the code that you used to do this in userChrome.css? That
sounds like the ideal solution to me. I am currently using the tabMinWidth
solution, but that only gives me 28 tabs at 1024x768. I prefer seeing all
tabs, without scrolling, and in one row. Your solution c) sounds nearly
perfect.
plabord
> On 11 Nov 2006 09:42:30 -0800,
>
> Type about:config in the location bar
>
> Search for a line that says browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
>
> Double click on that line and change the value to 0
>
> Close and restart the browser
-------------------------------------------------------
Thanks, that did the trick. By the way, I myself have great motor
coordination, so it's not just people with poor motor coordination who
don't like the current tab management scheme.
While looking around in the configuration setup I was also able to
change the closing button on each tab back to a single one at the end,
which I liked a lot better also (browser.tabs.closeButtons to value 3).
I tried Tab Mix Plus for the tab size/arrangement problem but didn't
see what I wanted there. Additional rows of gigantic tabs just create
more clutter, IMO.
Again, thanks for the solution.
Tony Mechelynck
I have
.tabbrowser-tabs *|tab
{ height: 18px !important
; min-width: 18px !important
}
but I'm not sure whether it's overridden by
browser.tabs.tabMinWidth user set integer 16
extensions.tabmix.minWidth user set integer 16
in about:config (it's not easy to see by eye the difference between 16 and 18
pixels). Note that the extensions.tabmix.minWidth setting above will be reset
to 22 if I use the Tab Mix Plus UI; but as long as I don't, it will stay and
be obeyed.
I also use solution (d) above, because with sometimes more than 100 tabs
there's no way I can keep them on one row and see all favicons.
Best regards,
Tony.
Ron Hunter
tab-feature-abuse to me. Grin.
I am constantly amazed by the variety of ways in which this tool is used
by various people.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
Tony Mechelynck
[...]
> I am constantly amazed by the variety of ways in which this tool is used
> by various people.
That's the advantage of a versatile application. Design it with versatility
and flexibility built-in, and various users will find various ways to use it
-- the more the merrier ;-) -- and like it for those various ways of using it.
Best regards,
Tony.
FoxWolfie Galen
<antoine.m...@belgacom.net> wrote:
This works great. I purposely set the min-width to 4 just to test it. I had
over 200 tabs open before I gave up. The browser was starting to get a bit
sluggish by then! The userChrome.css overrides the browser.tabs.tabMinWidth
setting for me. I never installed the tabmix extension to test that one.
> in about:config (it's not easy to see by eye the difference between 16 and
> 18 pixels).
No matter what I set in browser.tabs.tabMinWidth, it would never honor
anything below 33. If I put a zero in there, it was treated as 33,
resulting in a maximum of 28 tabs for me. The userChrome.css solution lets
me go as small as I want. I assume the lower limit would actually be 2,
meaning a tab frame with no internal width. That would allow close to 500
tabs on a 1024x768 screen before scrolling took place, but would be
completely unusable! Any tabs size that is smaller than the fav-icon would
be a bit hard to click on for most people.
I set my min-width to 18, which gives me 55 tabs before scrolling at
1024x768. The most tabs I've ever opened at once, not counting this
testing, was a little over 60. That's about the point where I start
noticing that Firefox starts to slow down a bit.
> Note that the extensions.tabmix.minWidth setting above will be reset
> to 22 if I use the Tab Mix Plus UI; but as long as I don't, it will stay
> and be obeyed.
> I also use solution (d) above, because with sometimes more than 100 tabs
> there's no way I can keep them on one row and see all favicons.
I've never opened that many in normal use! I only have 80 megs of RAM, so
it wouldn't be practical for me to go that far. Did you ever have that many
open and hit "close other tabs" by mistake? I wonder how much of something
like that the built in "undo close tab" can recover.
FoxWolfie Galen
wrote:
> I can't imagine opening 20 tabs, let alone 100. Sounds like
> tab-feature-abuse to me. Grin.
> I am constantly amazed by the variety of ways in which this tool is used
> by various people.
I open a lot mostly when using eBay. I do a search that results in several
hundred hits. I then browse the results, rapidly opening anything I'm
interested in to a new tab. Once I get to the end of the search results, I
then go back and actually look at all those tabs, closing them as I go.
This normally results in a dozen or two tabs open, but once got to over 60
at one time. I find it very fast to work this way. :)
Prior to Firefox 2.0, if the power went out with that many open, it wasn't
very fun. Now I am prompted to start with all those tabs still open when
needed.
Tony Mechelynck
[...]
> I've never opened that many in normal use! I only have 80 megs of RAM, so
> it wouldn't be practical for me to go that far. Did you ever have that many
> open and hit "close other tabs" by mistake? I wonder how much of something
> like that the built in "undo close tab" can recover.
I close tabs using either Ctrl-W, or the red X button at the end of the tab
bar: no risk of closing "other tabs" by mistake either way, but I shudder at
the mere thought!
Best regards,
Tony.
Ron Hunter
That is true, and the more I read of how other uses make the program
work for them, the more impressed I am by the software. I am still not
sure just why anyone would want, or need, 100 tabs open at once. Six or
eight seems more than I can manage at once.
On the other hand, I rather suspect that few users have the bookmarks
toolbar set up as I do.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
FoxWolfie Galen
I use the red X at the end of the tab bar as well, so hitting the "close
other tabs" by mistake should never happen. Ideally, I should remove that
from the menu just to be extra sure. I don't generally use the context menu
from the tab bar, unless I'm undoing an accidently closed tab. That can
happen if I click one time too many on the red X. The undo close tab
extension always came to the rescue, then when it was built in to 2.0, I
was able to dump that extension. I am still curious to know just how many
tabs are remembered by the built-in undo...
Ok, I just tested this. I opened 31 tabs to different sites. I purposely
hit the "close other tabs" and accepted the warning that 30 of the tabs
would be closed. I then started using the "undo close tab" to see how far
it would go. It recovered 10 of the closed tabs before it was no longer an
option, which appears to be the limit. If a person manages to accidently
close more than 10 tabs, they won't get all of them back. It seems to be a
reasonable limit.
Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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If it's "fixed", don't "break it"! mailto:pjo...@kimbanet.com
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------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Mechelynck
With Tab Mix Plus you can (among other things) remove Close Other Tabs from
the context menu, and change the number of closed tabs to remember (I have
left it set at 10).
It seems a reasonable limit, all the more so because you get a warning if you
try to close more than one tab in a single operation. If I close a tab by
mistake (and it does happen) I seldom close more than one additional tab, two
at most, before I realise than I need it back. Maybe I should lower that
number of a remembered tabs (to 5 maybe) in an attempt to hold the browser
footprint down; but OTOH, 5 tabs aren't much (compared to 102 "open" tabs ATM).
Best regards,
Tony.
Ron Hunter
just how much ram is actually available at the time.
--
Ron Hunter rphu...@charter.net
FoxWolfie Galen
<antoine.m...@belgacom.net> wrote:
I am assuming the remembered tabs limit is in effect in the event of a
power outage or browser crash. I had two outages since installing Firefox
2.0, and each time, I was given the option to start from where I left off
with all tabs loaded. I didn't happen to have more the a few open either
time though, so they all came back. I don't really feel like opening 50
tabs and purposely killing the power to see what happens. It's bound to
happen by accident for me eventually.
The Real Bev
>>
>>> I close tabs using either Ctrl-W, or the red X button at the end of the
>>> tab bar: no risk of closing "other tabs" by mistake either way, but I
>>> shudder at the mere thought!
W is WAYYYY too close to Q, as I've found to my great distress :-( At
least the buttons don't have unintended consequences.
--
Cheers, Bev (Happy Linux User #85683, Slackware 11.0)
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Faster, faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death."
-- Hunter S. Thompson
Ron Hunter
Alex K.
> No matter what I set in browser.tabs.tabMinWidth, it would never honor
> anything below 33. If I put a zero in there, it was treated as 33,
> resulting in a maximum of 28 tabs for me. The userChrome.css solution lets
> me go as small as I want.
Just an aside here. I don't know for sure, but I wonder if the UI code
for that entry is checking for a minimum value & overriding it with a
minimum if its below that.
Under Linux, for example, the Pan newsreader will limit you to a maximum
of 4 concurrent connections to the news server, if you change it in the
Preferences UI.
However, by editing a config file by hand, you can override that limit,
as it bypasses the check built into the UI.
It would *appear* that something similar may be taking place in this case.
Its just an educated guess, though.
--
Alex K.
FoxWolfie Galen
The value for browser.tabs.tabMinWidth is stored as 0 in actual prefs.js
file, so I must assume the software simply overrides any value that is
smaller than a pre-determined limit. Editing the userChrome.css file
bypasses the limit checking, as it fully honors whatever I specify.
Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T
Well I loaded FF2 on my G4-500 and my G4-1.67 17" Powerbook.
On both machines I was able to actually see this feature.
In Both cases I tried to set preferences for Pdf extension from the
Tools menu directly. The drop down window would come down but there is
no close box or in case of Mac green, yellow , red dot at top of box.
There was no way to get out and dismiss anything so I had to Force quit.
However If I open the extensions Manager and click on preferences the
same window come as a floating box that has a close button.
So I found a major bug.
Any way when I reopened after the force quit it showed this option. Of
course I didn't try this in other programs that have this feature
something is screwed up and you have to quit and go to new session
anyway. I figured I would have the troubles.
Ron K.
I believe I read in a comment in one of the application parent files that
are imported into the default prefs.js, that a value of '0' can imply
unlimited or auto setting for the pref. A value of 1 or higher will be
taken as a literal setting that bypasses auto calculation. Most prefs in
prefs.js can have a user override set in user.js. An action taken in the
about.config edit window to 'reset default' will reapply the setting found
in the application parent file that sources the pref.
--
Ron K.
Don't be a fonted, it's just type casting.
Moz Champion (Dan)
Excuse me Phillip but what feature were you attempting to access?
Exactly what did you select from the Tools menu?
Leonidas Jones
As i said elsewhere, the bug would be in the extension, not in Firefox,
and would most likely be only on the Mac OS.
Try using the Escape key to close the options dialogs.
Lee
--
Leonidas Jones, Mozilla/Netscape Champion
Learn about the Champs! http://mozillachampions.ufaq.org
The UFAQ'S http://www.ufaq.org/
http://www.mozilla.org/community/etiquette.html
http://mozilla.com http://mozilla.org
Phillip M. Jones, C.E.T
I was attempting to set up the preference for the PDFDownload (Or US
Switcher) Extension in the Tools menu.
When I went through the addons menu and highlighed the extension and
clicked preferences everything worked fine. same with User Agent Switcher.
However, when I attempted to set there preferences through the tool menu
and highlighting PDF Download or UA Switcher when preference menu opened
up there was no way out except by Force quit of FF2. no close button no
close button (same as close box for PC).
Moz Champion (Dan)
Well, the only one of my extensions that show up in the Tools menu by
name is DownThemAll, so I would suggest using the Tools-->Addons route