Firefox 3.6 – How To Open Tabs at End of Tab Bar

With the release of Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6, we are introduced to a new behavior of how tabs are opened when you click on a link. Clicking on a link on a web page will now open the tab next to the one you’re currently in, forcing an “open relative” behavior. If you’re an avid tab user like me, you’re probably a little irked that they’ve gone and changed something like this and not provided an easy way to change it back in the Preferences.

Changing this setting back to where tabs open at the end of the tab bar is relatively easy and will only require a quick trip into the about:config section of Firefox.

1. Go To Configuration Settings
In the Address Bar, type about:config and hit enter. You’ll be greeted with a cheerful warning that proceeding into this section of Firefox might void your warranty. Click the button to promise that you’ll be careful.

2. Filter It Out!
In the Filter bar, type browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent which will filter out all the values we don’t need to see and just display the one we’ll be changing.

3. Toggle It!
Once you have found the browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent preference, you’ll notice that the default value is true. Right-click on the preference name and choose Toggle (or just double-click the preference name to toggle automatically). This will change the value to false.

4. Enjoy!
That’s it! You can close out the about:config window and enjoy having your tabs work like they used to.

Some will argue that we should just attempt to embrace the new open relative behavior. But I am far too set in my tab-using ways at this point. Mozilla is just going to have to embrace us.