In a somewhat controversial decision, it was decided that if you open a group of tabs (middle-click on a bookmark folder) in Firefox, those new pages will be opened in the currently opened tabs, rather than being added. There is, however, a setting to make groups of tabs be opened in new tabs, rather than the existing ones.
Enter about:config in the address bar. In the resulting page, search for the preference browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace.
Double-click on it, which should change the value to false.
Thank you for this. I’ve been wondering what happened ever since the behaviour was changed and it’s been irritating me ever since.
Yeah, I never understood that decision. I’ve had it set to add new tabs for ages.
Who actually decides this kind of stuff? It seems like there are changes every release that annoy the hell out of users (like the constant change of the location of the X button on tabs) but are kept and then is changed repeatedly. It’s like the developers are using Firefox releases as UI experiments. I fail to see the logic in FF 2’s behavior of searching whatever engine the search box has selected when searching text from the context menu, but I’m sure there’s some reason that it /must/ be that way, regardless of users’ opinions, and will finally be fixed in coming releases.
Yeah this drives me mad! It basically makes opening groups of tabs unusable!
GERRRR! 🙂
Please change the default too? I’ve had people at my workplace trying to use it and getting frustrated too.
I blogged about this in 2004 and still dispute the design decision, but I guess we all need benevolent dictators in some design decisions or things will never get done.
Still, the number of people who complain about this seems more than the number of people who like it the way it is, but we all know that people who are contented are unlikely to protest.
I’d be glad if they would eventually “fix” this though 😛
Thanks much for this fix! I’m a recent convert from IE, but little things like this make it easy to see why so many people refuse to make the jump from a sluggish, route-form browser to Firefox.