This Space for Rent

The people who designed mozilla weboyster generally do a good job of it, but for some inexplicable reason they appear to really love "tabbed browsing", even on windowing systems that already know how to manage windows (really!) Every time I get a new version of moondog, I discover that the busy little gnomes in mozillaville have found even more ways to sully my user experience by stuffing new windows into tabs.

A few weeks ago, I dropped firefox 2.(something) onto one of my new laptops because the quicktime association on that machine was bolluxed and 1.0.7 would announce that situation by dumping core every time I discovered a page with quicktime goop on it. I upgraded that box to 2.(something) hoping that it would have a way for me to tell the damned browser to JUST NOT TRY TO RUN QUICKTIME!!!!, and it did. It also had some other nice features, like being able to resume crashed sessions (when you've got 12 browser windows nicely stacked up at the bottom right corner of your tty, it's a real pain to have them just evaporate) and support for -moz-column-width and -moz-column-gap css to give proper multicolumn output like G-d himself intended text to have (these two -moz-column attributes make up, all by themselves, for the evil <flash> tag.) But, because it's Mozilla Superfrog, it also has new ways for nasty tabs to insinuate themselves onto your screen.

Are they documented? Probably, somewhere in the approximately 75 million words written on the various internal mozilla design, coding, and debugging newsgroups. But that's not extraordinarily useful. Are they documented in the Waterquail public support areas? Not obviously; searching for "how to stop firefox from opening tabs" leads to many many many many web pages, all of which cheerfully tell you about ways to OPEN MORE TABS, which is not exactly what I was looking for.

The silver bullet, perhaps, to turn the latest sort of nasty tab feature off is to go into about:config and set browser.tabs.maxopenbeforewarn to zero; I'm not sure what the warning is supposed to say, because I never see it but am instead faced with a new window whenever I click on a "please open me in a new window" link.

I'd be happier, of course, if spacetuna came with a tab configuration config window that the browser actually paid attention to, but anything works as long as I don't see any of those tabs.