Large Tabs
Firefox 2.0’s tabs are way too wide for me. I want to be able to see all of my tabs on the screen at once. With 2.0’s default tab size and my usual window size, I can only see nine tabs at once (yes, I need a bigger monitor that can do higher resolutions, but that’s besides the point.) It’s tough to skip around between tabs, and if I middle-click a link to open it in a new tab, I don’t get any visual confirmation that it’s loading, since the new tab is off to the right side of the visible ones. I’d need to scroll to the right to see that yes, it has opened that page in a new tab.
The fix is to go to about:config and change browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to a new width. I’m assuming this is in pixels. The default is 100. You can go down to 0 if you never ever want to scroll.
Tab Close Buttons on Every Tab
Firefox 2.0 also adds a big red “close this tab” button on every single tab. Why? That gives you less space to see the name of the tab, and it just makes it likely that I’ll accidentally close the tab when I want to switch to it (I already did that twice in the first day of using Firefox 2.0). If I want to close a tab, I’ll middle-click on it. Why add a different, less convenient way to close the tab? Bad Firefox, no leftover Halloween candy for you!
Luckily, this too can be turned off. In about:config, set browser.tabs.closeButtons to 3 to go back to Firefox 1.5’s behavior (one close button on the right-hand side that closes the active tab.) That’s what I’m using now, but I might switch it to 2 later, which is no close buttons at all. I once in a while use the right-hand close button, but it’s pretty rare. Maybe I’ll just get rid of it completely to free up space and see if I miss it. I doubt that I would.
And there you have it. Two quick fixes to get rid of Firefox 2.0’s most annoying new tab quirks. Hope it helped someone else, it took me a bit more Googling than it should have to find the solutions.