Soft Tech Reviews

How many tabs do you open in a Firefox window? Five, eight, twenty? I usually start off with one and then it increases to five, ten and then fifteen until I can’t see all of the tabs anymore. Firefox makes me scroll to find the hidden ones. Firefox does this so the tabs are readable, but in a previous version the tabs would shrink so much that they weren’t readable. Who cares about readable, that’s what wide screens and favicons are for!

This has bothered me for some time, but never thought there could be a setting or even a plugin to change this. Yesterday I was doing my usual, going from one website to another, searching for this or that and came upon a blog I didn’t know would make future browsing easier. Humanized is a company helping make the computer experience better for people.

On to the workaround to fix the forever scrolling tabs.

1. Open a new Firefox tab
2. Type about:config into the address bar
3. Type tab into the filter field
4. Change the settings of both browsers.tab.tabClipWidth and browsers.tab.tabMinWidth to 5 (or whatever your preference is)
5. Restart Firefox

To learn more about how these tabs work (the workaround and previously) I recommend reading Firefox 2.0: Tabs Gone Wrong.