Is the way Firefox treats web pages as tabs supposed to make sense?

[tashirosgt]

I admit to being a meek user of web browsers and I tend to accept whatever they do as best for me. But I can't help wonder if there is supposed to be some sense to the way that they handle web pages as tabs and the way the forward and back arrows work. In the first place, when you use the forward and back arrows, you often don't see web pages that you have recently browsed. For example if you do a Goggle search and go to a page that is one of the links and browse more pages, when you use the back arrow, you may or may not encounter that link again. Sometimes you just get the Google search page. And I don't understand how the browsers (Firefox, in particular) decided to make a web page into a "tab". I often find myself on a page with the back arrow inactive. When I try to close it, I get that warning about "you are about to close <several> tabs".

Am I supposed to be better off because of this?

[Jake]

The whole point in tabs is to be tider, you can disable them. It's just so you don't have a billion windows open all over the task bar.

[tashirosgt]

But what criteria is used to decide whether to open a new window (or tab) versus closing the window you are using and "proceeding onward" to a new window. Or am I having a delusion that this happens? Perhaps I loose track of all the windows in the task bar, but it certainly seems like not all the pages that I browse pile up there.

[Jake]

Hmm. I would take a look in > Edit > Preferences > Tabs. If I was you... each tab has it's own little x which you can use to close the page, by default firefox opens the page in a new tab rather than window (unless some javascript tells firefox to open it in new windows of x by x pixels and or you right click and open in new window.

[pwca]

Originally Posted by tashirosgt

But what criteria is used to decide whether to open a new window (or tab) versus closing the window you are using and "proceeding onward" to a new window. Or am I having a delusion that this happens? Perhaps I loose track of all the windows in the task bar, but it certainly seems like not all the pages that I browse pile up there.

You are not having a delusion. There are plenty of times when I performed a google search and then went to several sites (in the same tab) drilling through. But wanting to backtrack found myself going not sequentially backward but straight back to the google search results.

I have no idea how Firefox (or should I really be accusing Mozilla's engine here) makes these decisions but it can, at times, be annoying.

The following advice won't solve the above issue but will take care of your open link in new window vs new tab issue.

In the Firefox menu select:

Edit--> Preferences--> in the pop-up GUI select "Tabs"

the tick-boxes and radio buttons are self-explanatory.

[JohnVV]

i do believe that this is new for FF3 , 2 did not do this .