Firefox 2.0 is now available for download from Mozilla. This is old news for most early adopters but I thought I write about it for the non-early-adopter crowd. One of the things that I love about Firefox is tabbed browsing. I can open up 45 tabs within one Firefox window. That many tabs can suck the ram out of my computer like an Anne Rice vampire but I am hooked on Firefox. It is infinity (+1) times better than Internet Explorer.
One of the features of Firefox 2.0 that I immediately disliked…think vampire + garlic…was the location of the tab close “X” on each individual tab. In Firefox 1.5, the “X” was placed all the way to the right side of the window. Overtime, my right hand became trained to closing tabs by clicking the little red “X” on the far right.
Fortunately, Firefox 2.0 can be “adjusted” via the about:config command. Entering about:config into the Firefox address bar opens up a configuration page to tweak various program settings.
- Enter about:config into the address bar
- Type browser.tabs.closeButtons into the filter text box
- Change the default value from 1 to 3.
- Rejoice! The close tab “X” is now on the far right side of the window.
For more tips on adjusting, tweaking, and otherwise modifying Firefox check out LifeHacker’s list of Firefox 2.0 configuration tweaks.
that’s funny, cuz the location of the tab close button was the first thing i noticed and loved about the new firefox. different strokes, eh? i didn’t like having the one universal close button cuz i would often double-tap the button on accident and close more than one window. thanks for the lifehacker link!
Heh. At first, I loved the idea of each tab having it’s own close button, but I find myself always going to the right side of the window now and clicking the “list all tabs” button when I want to close a window.
The jury is still out on this one for me.
Tabs can be closed via 2 additional ways…clicking on a tab with the middle scroll button (if your mouse has this feature) will close a tab as well as CTRL + W.
are you having any problem with firefox freezing up? cuz it has happened to me a few times now and it never happened before.
@ vegankid,
no problems so far…i did implement the ram tweaks from the lifehacker site…
hmm. i’ll have to take a look at that. i think my problem is that i really like to overwork firefox by running gmail, my CRM, meebo, and at least half a dozen other tabs at any given point. not to mention i usually have an ftp running.
That’s really strange, I usually run gmail, statcounter, bloglines, and about 15-20 other sites in Firefox without any trouble. I have 512 mbs of ram on a very slow pentium 3. The only app that seems to really cause problems is Pandora. I usually end up running Pandora in IE.
I have noticed that Firefox 2.0 and the latest version of I-Tunes do not get along very well. Songs start skipping whenever I’m opening new tabs…
Thanks for mentioning Meebo. I’ve been using Trillian on my home computer for managing my instant messaging needs, but Meebo would be great for when I’m at a library or internet cafe.