Oh, I forgot about that ... it might not be there by default. Just right-click in the whitespace, new boolean, set the name and set it to false.

Yeah, it works and it looks good for the most prat, but they definitely need to update it for the now round URL bar where the favicon is in 3.5.

It seems like they gave up on it, last update was for 3.1 builds in March.

I love it ! Especially this new stuff about watching videos without having the plug-ins. It's great so far. It also opens a hell of a lot faster than previousMozilla!!!

(edit to add: I finally found the forum entry point, but only on mozilla.org...it doesn't seem to exist on mozilla.com site...not even a pointer. User shouldn't have to worry about whether started from .com or .org site)
Did mozilla eliminate the feedback forum? Or, is my memory playing tricks on me and there never was one? I can't find it now. I could swear I've posted Firefox bugs and usability issues to Mozilla/Firefox before.

I have 4 usability issues for Firefox 3.5:

Bad ergonomic change
1) In 3.5 they added a "+" (new tab) button on the tabs bar. I am now constantly accidently clicking on that damn button instead of the ">" button that is right next to it (because I became used to clicking ">" when it was right next to the "V" button (show all tabs in list). My vision problems are a big issue here, and there is no way to customize the tabs bar to provide enhanced separation or relocate these buttons.

Tab easy re-location feature eliminated
2) In 3.5 they appear to have eliminated the ability to EASILY move tabs from one location to the beginning or end of the displayed tabs. You used to be able to highlight a tab, and then press ctrl+home or ctrl+end. You can still put the mouse on a tab and "drag" it to where you want it, but that takes much more time when you have a lot of tabs open. I see no reason for them to have removed this function.

(it would also be a nice option to have "move to left-most position" and "move to right-most position" in the right-click on a tab's drop-down menu)

Security/Privacy add-on extension Redirect-Remover broken
3) In 3.5 mozilla "broke" the add-on "Redirect Remover", and update for the add-on extension is unfortunately not available. "Redirect Remover" is (to me) a vital user controllable security/privacy add-on extension and it's very disappointing to see it get "broken" without advance notice...which should be a piece of cake to check and report to the user, allowing for better informed update decisions.

Firefox update procedure improvement
4) Why doesn't the Firefox update procedure tell the user IN ADVANCE when an add-on/extension is going to be broken and an update "fix" is unavailable? That should be a very easy test to perform and report to the user before committing the user to the update instead of after the update is installed.

That's an easy one. Close Firefox, open the folder containing your Firefox user profile:
%appdata%\Mozilla\Firefox\ [your profile name] \chrome\userChrome.css

And add:
.tabs-newtab-button { display: none !important; }



I installed that just to check it out, the big problem is just a maxVersion limit (meaning that Firefox REFUSES to load it, as opposed to it not being ABLE to). I have that version checking disabled, and that seems to work in that case. It installed and works, although according to a post on AMO:

RDR works on FF 3.5. But there are two bugs after such a hacking action: 1. No special cursor appeared on cleaned links 2. No cleaned link displayed on the status bar ("RDR:http://www.site.com")

To disable version checking, set the boolean extensions.checkCompatibility to false in about:config (you may have to create the boolean).

Although as a note, I don't consider the breaking of extensions to be Mozilla's fault for a major upgrade of Firefox. If extensions broke between 3.0.10 and 3.0.11, then that would be a problem. But just because the extension developer created an extension once doesn't mean they it's not their responsibility to keep it updated.

Alright John, my girlfriend was complaining about this same thing with the new tab button, you can fix it by putting the following into your UserChrome.css file in your Firefox Profile.



I don't know about the ctrl+home and ctrl+end thing, but to move left or right a tab, do ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab

The extension thing is something that is left up to the developer to maintain and update. This is not Mozilla's prerogative.

Lastly, I'm pretty sure Firefox notified me of which extensions wouldn't work upon updating, so I'm not sure why you're running into this issue. Perhaps you missed it?

Edit: Woah, hi there McFly. This is why you don't take phone calls while posting. Or at least refresh first.

There is a lot of great stuff you can do with userChrome.css. I have a pretty length userChrome.css for all of the Chrome elements of Firefox, and a s**tton of userstyles for Stylish (which would normally go in userContent.css). All of which are homemade, and all of which I couldn't live without. <3

Thanks ~Vel and McFly,

I've resisted going with the Chrome clone, but I might give it a try to provide that functionality. Easy tab re-positioning is important to me.

Yup! I know it's up to the developers to update their extensions, but I can say with pretty high confidence I didn't get a warning until AFTER the update was downloaded and Firefox was updated and restarted. I even tried to look for any known incompatibilities before I downloaded the 3.5 update and didn't find any related to any of my extensions...so I was monitoring and doing things very carefully. Still, with my vision I might have missed something.

~Vel said

What I need to do is to be able to move the physical location in the tab bar of a given tab to the left or right (preferably to one end or the other), without having to drag tabs around using the mouse.<In addition to using the old way of ctrl+home or ctrl+end, something like ctrl+LeftArrow and ctrl+RightArrow would seem a logical way to physically move a highlighted tab left or right one position at a time...but I don't believe that function was ever available.> I know about moving the focus from one tab to another by using ctrl+tab and ctrl+shift+tab...but they aren't the same thing...the tabs stay in their same relative locations. It looks like chrome might be the answer there as well.


~Vel said

I hate how Google named their browser Chrome. It only get confusing when you're trying to distinguish between that crap browser from the Mozilla "Chrome" (XUL).

I just looked, and it seems that the functions for doing this, such as moveTabToEnd(), still exist. I'll see what I can do for you about re-enabling them, or maybe writing a small extension for this. The Ctrl+Left, Ctrl+Right keys could be easily done that way too. I'll keep you posted.

EDIT: Actually, you're in luck. I found these functions, all of which work:
moveTabForward()
moveTabBackward()
moveTabToStart()
moveTabToEnd()

I'll get something going.

Okay, so ...

Apparently, that feature is still supported in 3.5, but there may be something wrong with it. Ctrl+Left, Ctrl+Right, Ctrl+Home, and Ctrl+End all work as you described you wanted them to, but you have to have the tabbrowser almost PERFECTLY selected to do so, otherwise it fails at:

if (aEvent.target.localName == "tabbrowser")

It seems to be really, really picky about where you've clicked.

Possible bug report?

Yeah, I think so, Vel. I'll look around Bugzilla and see if it's already been posted. I'm working on a small extension as a workaround for John in the meantime, though.

John, where those key-commands in 3.0.* applicable even when your tabbrowser wasn't selected? For example, if you had just clicked on something inside of a webpage, and then hit Ctrl+Right, would the tab move? Or would you first have to click the actual tab ... ? It seems to me that the "global" implementation (keypress from anywhere) would be easier.

Okay, try this, John. I just made this extension, hopefully it works well for you.

CtrlYerTabs 0.2.0:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/downloads/file/57716/...2.0-fx.xpi

There's no public page for it, I just made it an 'inactive' extension with a download link. ~Vel, you could beta-test it too if you want.

McFly said:

Works in both Vista x32 and Leopard for me.

lol McFly you're a fooking genius man. How you come up with this stuff in such a short notice and the cool names! We're in yer debt!

go for it:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/about/careers.html#feature-meet

Thanks! It works great in Firefox 3.5, XP Pro 32bit

As you point out, selection is a bit odd, but once you've actually relocated the tab at least once, the selection dash-box highlight within the tab is displayed.

Definitely appreciate the added ctrl+LeftArrow and ctrl+RightArrow functionality, too!

Yeah, once you actually have the tab selected (with the dotted border), I think you're actually using the built-in functions for moving the tabs.

That where the problem seems to be: you can't click-select the tabs by themselves now, which makes those functions (by themselves) useless.

How do like the behavior of the extension vs. the behavior of Fx 3.0? (by that I mean with the extension, you can do Ctrl+Home from anywhere, with or without the tab selected)