439696 - no way to globally disable tabs

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, defect)

Description

[Jamie Zawinski]

I want Firefox to never use tabs, ever.  Whenever a new window is requested (e.g., middle-click) I want it to open in a new window instead of a tab.

"Preferences / New pages should open in / A new window" is insufficient.  Middle-click and option-click still open the link in a new tab.

This doesn't fix it either.  It used to:
user_pref("browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick", false);

This broke sometime between 1.0 and 2.0.0.5.  It is still broken in 3.0.

Comment 1

[Elmar Ludwig]

> user_pref("browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick", false);

This works fine for me on Linux in Firefox 3. I can't test this on Mac.

Comment 2

[Robin Whittleton]

user_pref("browser.tabs.opentabfor.middleclick", false) works fine on Fx3.0.1 Mac. It obviously don't kill the tab system completely though and you can still open them with option-click.

Comment 3

[Shahar Or]

I've reported this downstream Ubuntu before coming upon this report. Here's what I wrote there, in bug
https://bugs.launchpad.net/firefox/+bug/1070540

"
Dear friends,

I'd like to see the feature to disable tabs altogether.

I like my window manager and I want it to handle all my different open apps, documents and sites. Offloading this job to a single app, which is what tabs are, is counter-productive for me.

But Firefox doesn't have the feature to disable tabbed browsing.

Thanks,
Shahar
"

I really hope that this can get a certain status because desktops are still in use and some people may use this "feature".

Technically, this isn't a freature request, perhaps, because it is more like a bug that I can't turn off a certain freature, however helpful it seems to the vast majority of the users.

Thanks,
Shahar