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Firefox on Linux Mint is driving me batty, please help

I finally made the jump to Linux after one bloody virus related pop-up too many on Windows this past weekend. So far, everything’s been good. But there’s one thing that’s driving me about batty. I can’t figure out how to stop Firefox from opening multiple windows when I click on a link in an email or the occasional site.

I swear there was an option on Windows that when checked forced Firefox to open a new tab if it was already open. Am I going blind, senile or this not an option on the Linux version?

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Posted in General. Tagged with , .

By Karen
June 6, 2007


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4 Responses

"People who advocate freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without the awful roar of the thunder and lightning.

Without struggle, there is no progress. This struggle might be a moral one. It might be a physical one. It might be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. People may not get all that they pay for in this world, but they certainly pay for all that they get." ~ Frederick Douglas

  1. Steve Carl said
    on June 7, 2007

    Edit / Preferences / Tabs
    Select the “A New Tab”

    Some pages will still open in new windows: They appear to have found a way around the preference.

    This is Mint 3.0 / Firefox 2.0.4 on my computer, but I do not think where this is set it has changed since FF 2.0 came out.

    I have not researched this, but there may be some FF extentions that give
    you better control, along the lines of what Adblock does for allowing you to remove pages that do no behave. Mozdev.org a good place to poke around for that.

  2. KC said
    on June 8, 2007

    Hi Steve.

    That’s the option I found and checked, but it’s not working. I don’t think it’s the sites as I just checked out a site that’s forcing new windows to open on windows and it opened a tab instead. I also checked it out on my husband’s laptop (he uses Ubuntu) and it did the same thing - forced another window to open.

    I know it’s a minor thing - but man is it annoying…

  3. Maverick Prowls said
    on July 1, 2007

    I found this advice on the Ubuntu linux forums which helped me:

    Open a new tab, enter about:config in the address bar.
    In the resulting list, set the following options:

    browser.link.open_newwindow = 3
    browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction = 0
    browser.search.openintab = true

    This has solved most of my problems so far.

    Credit to “Gausian” who posted this on the Ubuntu Forums.

  4. carlos said
    on July 27, 2007

    thanks for the tip MP, I was getting annoyed at the new behavior too.
    C