Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Getting Rid Of Horizontal Tab Scrolling In Firefox 2.0

A new addition to Firefox 2.0 is horizontal tab scrolling. If you are not sure what it is, just open more than 15 or so tabs in Firefox. You will start seeing new arrow heads all the way to the left of the tab area. You can either use those arrows or your mouse wheel while hovering over the tabs.

I, on the other hand, do not particularly like the need to scroll to go from one tab to another. I usually have a bunch of tabs open at the same time and bounce all over the place from one to another. So, when I upgraded to Firefox 2.0, horizontal tab scrolling was the first thing that I wanted to get rid of.

[Full story after the jump]

There are a couple of ways to help get rid of the horizontal scrolling. One way is to go into about:config and change some values. But that wont work if you have the Tab Mix Plus add-on. So I will assume that most of you have that add-on and give you directions on how to stop horizontal tab scrolling. If you do not have Tab Mix Plus you should get it, its an awesome add-on.

Ok, so hit the Tools dropdown menu and click on Tab Mix Plus Options. In that options window click on Display at the top of the window then the "Tab" tab. Towards the bottom of this screen, you will see a field labeled "Tab Width". Go ahead and change that value to 22. This is the minimum width that the tabs will go to. And the resulting effects will be similar to earlier versions of Firefox where you couldn't see any of the tab info when you had a ton of tabs open. This will not completely get rid of the horizontal tab scrolling, but it will drastically increase the amount of tabs you can have open before the scrolling kicks in. And if you know of any other ways to hinder or get rid of the scrolling effect, please let us all know about it in the comments below.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you ! i was uninstalling FF 2.0 because of that Hor. scrolling !!

Poncharello

Trip said...

Type about:config into the address bar. Change the value of browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to 0. Allows me to have 30 or so open tabs before the scroll kicks in.

Ryan said...

The add-on tab mix plus overwrites that value somehow. So if you have tab mix plus, changing browser.tabs.tabMinWidth to zero will not do anything.

But if you do not have tab mix plus, then, yes, that way will work.

Anonymous said...

Thanks Trip, that worked.

I was just about to uninstall 2.0 because of that scrolling, which they offer no way to turn off.

No longer using TabMixPlus, because it made firefox unstable, so using Session Manager instead.

On a side note, firefox is not displaying the 'word verification' needed to post on this site, so I had to use IE. Weird.