Firefox, Close Thyself
Posted by Hans Fugal
Firefox 2.0 is pretty slick, but one thing really bugged me. When you close the last tab with command-w, the window stays there. I thought, "hmm, maybe this is a feature not a bug so I'll try it for awhile and maybe I'll like it." I didn't like it. Luckily the fix is not hard. Just uncheck "Always show the tab bar" in the tab preferences pane, and sanity will descend upon your zorro. This is of course completely illogical and uncalled-for. Heck, even an entry in about:config would be better (yes, I looked there). But at least it's controllable.
You must download one of the essential firefox extensions. It's called TabMix plus. It has seperate options for "close window with last tab" and "show the tab bar even when only one tab". I personally have it not close the window, which actually annoys me a little. It only remains as an artifact of an experiment long ago. I run into it so rarely (I only close firefox when I start running low on memory and at that point I just use the 'x' or Meta-w) that I don't have sufficient prompting to change it. Another great option in TabMix is you can force every single link ever to always open in a tab in the existing window (yes, even popups, if you ever get those, the useful ones, too).
Agreed.
1) There should be an option 2) It should be on by default 3) It should be forced on when "Always show the tab bar" is off 4) That option should be a different option than "Always show the tab bar".
I'd like to be able to always show the tab bar (i.e. have the tab bar when there's only one tab open[1]), yet also close the window when I close the last tab.
I can see some use in having C-w on the last tab leave the browser open, however. I have a bookmark folder for all the comics I read daily. I "Open in Tabs", then C-w each as I read through them. Once I hit the end I'd be presented with a blank browser where I can Meta-Home to get to my home page, rather than needing to reopen it. In fact, IIRC this is the behavior on my Mac already (not at home to verify).
And you can always use C-S-w on windows or Meta-q on Mac to actually close the full application.
[1] I always turn "Always show tab bar" *on* after a fresh install -- the constant resizing of the window decoration when I go from one to two tabs or two to one tab gets on my nerves.
Apparently placing a line with ——— after a paragraph turns it into an H2 :). I didn't really mean to put that much emphasis on my last statement.
And above, those are supposed to be -s, not —s. I was trying to be careful to not have it interpreted again and chose the wrong HTML entity. I'll shut up now.