The Modern Hippy Male

How to: Make Firefox open new Tabs to the far right – Firefox Tips and Tricks

If you’re like me, you’re awesome. And, although being awesome is… awesome, it can come with some drawbacks. I’ll outline those now in the form of a pros vs. cons list. If you have reached this page accidentally, and, in fact, are not awesome, scroll to the bottom of this post and read the Short Version.

The Pros and Cons of being Awesome.

As you may have noticed, that last con I listed is pretty horrible. You may be thinking, “I know, now I have to find another Firefox add-on to fix the new tab creation location.” Well, my awesome friend, think again…

Changing the configuration of Firefox 3.6

So that new tabs open all the way at the end of open tabs instead of immediately to the right of the current tab.

In the release of Firefox 3.6 the default manner in which new tabs are opened in the browser has been changed. New tabs used to be created at the end of the list of other open tabs, on the far right. Now, with Firefox 3.6 default, tabs are created immediately to the right of the tab in which the link was clicked. To change the functionality Firefox 3.6 configuration so that new tabs will once again be opened to the far right, read along or skip to the bottom for the short version.

Listen closely, dear reader. On your computer there is a program (Firefox 3.6). Within this program there are configuration settings (about:config). Locate these configuration settings and you will find that of which you seek… a solution to your problem.

Step 1:

Firstly, we must calculate the average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow. Fortunately there are many Monty Python fans who have performed this step admirably. (http://www.style.org/unladenswallow/)

24 miles an hour = Average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow

Step 2:

Now that we know the average cruising airspeed velocity of an unladen European Swallow, we have one more thing to add to the Pros side of our list. This makes us all just that much more awesome. Move on to step 3.

Step 3:

In your address bar, type about:config.

Type into your Firefox address bar.

Step 4:

Read the humorous, yet serious, yet strangely laughable warning provided by the good people at Mozilla, and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Step 5:

Type browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent into the filter box.

Type browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent into the filter box.

Step 6:

Double Click the listing so that the Value field changes to false.

Double click the listing so that the value is changed to false.

All done – we just fixed your Firefox

Now you can see that new tabs open all the way at the end of open tabs instead of immediately to the right of the current tab. To change Firefox 3.6 so that new tabs open immediately to the right of the current tab, set the value for browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent to true.

Short Version:

In your address bar, type about:config.

Read the warning provided by the good people at Mozilla, and click the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Type browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent into the filter box.

Double Click the listing so that the Value field changes to false.

Spread the word

Only one thing left to do now that you’ve gotten the answer to your question, tell others. You can digg this post, or click the I like it! button on your Stumble! toolbar. Or, as always, just share a link to this post with your friends.

Firefox 3.5 Tips and Tricks: Features

Firefox 3.5 Loads Pages Faster

Firefox 3.5 is faster than Firefox 3; 2 times faster in fact. Also, Firefox v3.5 is about 10 times faster than Firefox v2. This is due in large part to the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that is being utilized by Firefox 3.5.

An excerpt from the Mozilla Wiki regarding TraceMonkey:

About TraceMonkey
TraceMonkey adds native code compilation to Mozilla’s JavaScript engine (known as “SpiderMonkey”). It is based on a technique developed at UC Irvine called “trace trees”, and building on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project. The net result is a massive speed increase both in the browser chrome and Web page content.
–Mozilla Wiki

TraceMonkey will help speed up many aspects of browsing the web. Videos, Images, Text… these should all load more quickly under Firefox v3.5.

Firefox 3.5 Improves Color

Firefox 3.5 makes use of improved color profiles. These will serve to help display images (and videos) with colors that are more vibrant. One limitation, however, is your monitor. If you have a monitor that does not display color well (old, cheap) you may not notice a difference.

Example?

Firefox v3.5 Manages Memory More Effectively

Firefox v3.5 also has a smaller memory footprint. However, this does not help much if the program itself sucks at managing that memory. Luckily, with version 3.5, the memory management has been improved. Past versions of Firefox, including v2 & v3, have suffered from numerous memory leaks. To combat this, a feature called the ‘XPCOM cycle collector’ works to free memory that the program no longer needs to hold.

An excerpt from the Mozilla Developer Center regarding the XPCOM cycle collector:

What the cycle collector does
The cycle collector spends most of its time accumulating (and forgetting about) pointers to XPCOM objects that might be involved in garbage cycles. This is the idle stage of the collector’s operation, in which special variants of nsAutoRefCnt register and unregister themselves very rapidly with the collector, as they pass through a “suspicious” refcount event (from N+1 to N, for nonzero N).
Periodically the collector wakes up and examines any suspicious pointers that have been sitting in its buffer for a while. This is the scanning stage of the collector’s operation. In this stage the collector repeatedly asks each candidate for a singleton cycle-collection helper class, and if that helper exists, the collector asks the helper to describe the candidate’s (owned) children. This way the collector builds a picture of the ownership subgraph reachable from suspicious objects.
If the collector finds a group of objects that all refer back to one another, and establishes that the objects’ reference counts are all accounted for by internal pointers within the group, it considers that group cyclical garbage, which it then attempts to free. This is the unlinking stage of the collectors operation. In this stage the collector walks through the garbage objects it has found, again consulting with their helper objects, asking the helper objects to “unlink” each object from its immediate children.
Note that the collector also knows how to walk through the JS heap, and can locate ownership cycles that pass in and out of it.

Other features of Firefox 3.5

• Over 6,000 Firefox Add-ons
• Internal Add-ons manager
• One click bookmarking.
• Tag sites for search
• No additional plug-ins needed to display Video and Audio content
• Save Videos to desktop as can be done with images
• Location aware browsing
• Private Browsing
• Forget this site feature