Disable tab grouping in Firefox!

Posted on March 12, 2010
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Firefox 3.6 has been released and prompted me for update today. I skipped it at work(fortunately), but did proceed with the update at home. Everything went OK with the upgrade and I got a nice greeting from the mozilla foundation congratulating me on using the “most of the best” browser out there. Well that’s pretty much great indeed

I went to one forum I read often and middle-clicked on half a dozen topics I found of interest and scrolled to the end of the tabs line(usually 30-40 tabs open) and … I didn’t find any new tab in there?!? WTF?!?

Well it turns out the mozilla team has implemented and set as default the same morronic tabs grouping concept as windows 7’s taskbar. I didn’t like it at all!!! I use lots of tabs and relative positioning is very important for my navigation. If I wanted a damn tree I’d plant one myself! Fortunately unlike the windows7 case mozilla team have an option to turn this idiocy off. It should have been shown at the “Tabs” tab in options, which is half empty, but I’m glad it exists at all…

To disable tab grouping in Firefox 3.6 or later do the following:

Type about:config in the address bar and press enter.
Agree that you will be careful. Be more careful than the one that put this on as default at least
You will be shown with a list of lower level options for Firefox. Type browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent in the filter field. You should see a single setting of type boolean.
Double-clik the browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent setting so it toggles and shows false;
Congratualtions you’re now with the good old sequential tabs interface.