This post is partially instructional and partially a look into how my brain works. (Be afraid... :)

A bit of history. A few months ago, a friend of mine posted something on Facebook about how frustrating it was to click a link in her news feed, get taken to a new page, then hit the Back button and find herself back at the top of the page (forcing her to scroll back down to try to find where she was before hitting the link). That prompted me to write a post on how to work around that problem: QuickTip: Open Web Links in a New Tab.

After that, whenever I was doing something in Firefox that involved the tabs, I made a little mental note that it might be an interesting tip for my readers. When Mozilla released a new version of Firefox (v3.6) at the end of January, I checked it out. And even though the upgrade itself didn't include much that I thought would be of huge interest to my readers, it made a good hook for writing a post that contained the tips I'd been collecting over the past few months:Working with Tabs in Firefox.

So far, so good. Then, a short while later, I was doing something in Firefox and realized I had forgotten to include one of my favourite tab-related tips in that post. (Note to self: Perhaps "mental" notes are not the best way to keep track of blog ideas...) I thought about writing a QuickTip or simply going back and updating the old post but, with other commitments on my plalte, I never got around to it. So I will add it here... at the end of the post. :)

So what prompted me to write this post? Well, over the last week or so, I suddenly noticed that whenever I open a link in a new tab, it would open in a tab right beside the one I clicked from, whereas I seemed to remember that it used to open a tab to the right of ALL the existing tabs. So I did a little Googling and, sure enough, the behaviour changed with the upgrade to 3.6—back in January.

You might think it's weird that it took me so long to notice this change, especially since I actually use this feature all the time. Several times a day at least. And I can't explain it. But the weirdness doesn't end there. Because two weeks ago, Darren Rowse of Problogger fame actually tweeted about this:

(On another note, how cool is this twitoaster service that lets you keep track of all the responses to a tweet? Definitely need to check it out for a future post...)

At this point I have no idea what I was thinking when I read that tweet but obviously I didn't think there was anything new about this. Because, if you scroll down the page I linked to above, you'll see I actually responded to him with this brilliant nugget:

Ummm... not so much.

So I would like to apologize to Darren for that particular brain spasm and thank him for his original tweet, which I'm guessing played a part in me finally recognizing this change in how the tabs opened, so I could share it with you.

I haven't decided yet whether I prefer this way or the old way, but if you would like to change it back you can do so easily. Just type "about:config" in your Firefox location bar and a page will open with a bajillion options you can configure for the browser, all in lovely database-speak.

Scroll down to the one that says browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent and double-click on it to change the last column from True to False. That will make new tabs open to the right of all the other open ones, like they did before v3.6.

The Best Tip

And now for the tip I forgot to share in my earlier post. I'm sure many people have had this experience before. You click on a link, go to a new page, finish reading what's there, and click the x to close the tab. Then you remember it wasn't a new tab you had opened after all—and you really wanted to go back to the page you had clicked from.

Fortunately, the History menu has an option to open tabs that you have recently closed. They will open in the same position they were in when you closed them and they will retain the full history of links the tab originally had, i.e. you can click the Back button and return to the page you were on before.

This little feature is another one I use all the time, so I hope you will also find it helpful.

Posted in Browsers,Firefox,How To,Updates