Firefox Tab Close Button Options

Firefox can be called the browser of the decade and its usage has been growing steadily since version 1.0 Version 1.5 and version 2.0 were two major upgrades we saw in the browser and the current version 2.0 is arguably ahead of the competiton in features. The first reason for its success is the ability to configure it your won way and the ability to add any feature you want by the help of Add-ons or Extensions. Version 2.0 has new features like automatic prefetch, completely new visual style, ability to view tab list at the extreme right of the tab bar and not limited to but including a new position for tab close button.

Earlier tere was only one common tab close button and clicking on it would close the current tab, but now every tab has a close button which is good but when it comes to closing multiple tabs it is a pain in the ass. You have to move the pointer to the close button on every tab and click on it instead of the earlier single common button which allowed to close tabs one by one by just clicking on the single button. There was a problem with this too, when you are closing multiple tabs one after the other using the common button you may accidentally close a tab you didnt intend to close. You dont have to worry now because firefox now has a Undo Close Tab option [ Ctrl + Shift + T ], right click anywhere on the tab bar andthe drop down menu has the Undo Close Tab option for you.

So why not change the Close Tab button back to its original place, which is a single close button for all tabs - to do this you will have to open the Mozilla configuration page about:config and type browser.tabs.closeButtons you will see an option with value 1 which is the default, double click and change the value to 3 and press OK. You now have a common close button. But what if you want both the common button and the individual button on each tab? Firefox doesnot support that yet but you have a solution, move your mouse over the tab you want to close and Middle Click it, almost all new mouse configurations have the Scroll wheel instead of the middle mouse button in which case click the scroll wheel, for those of you who never did this its gonna be exciting to see the tabs disappear as you middle click on them. You can close any tab not just the current tab. And if you feel like you closed the wrong tab right click on the tab bar and Undo Close Tab to see the tabs come back.

Now if you feel a little itchy you can remove the tab close button altogether by changing the vaule of browser.tabs.closeButtons to 2 in the about:config page. Changing it to 0 will make only the current tab to have a close button.

Incase you discovered more possibilities with the tab close button please let me know in the comments