Tab preferences and settings | Firefox Help (2024)

Tabs are an essential part of your browsing experience in Firefox, allowing you to keep multiple websites open in a single window. Firefox provides several options to customize how tabs work to suit your preferences. This article will guide you through these settings.

1. In the Menu bar at the top of the screen, click Firefox and then select Preferences or Settings, depending on your macOS version.Click the menu button and select Settings.
2. Select the General panel and go to the Tabs section.

• Ctrl+Tab cycles through tabs in recently used order: Select this setting if you want to use the Ctrl + TabControl + Tab keyboard shortcut to switch through open tabs in the order you viewed them rather than in the order they appear in the Firefox window.

  Note: If you want to use Ctrl + TabControl + Tab to switch to the tab next to the current tab and Ctrl + Shift + TabControl + Shift + Tab to switch to the previous tab, deselect this setting (clear the checkbox).

• Open links in tabs instead of new windows: This setting controls whether links from other applications or from web pages which request to open them in new windows are opened in a new window or a new tab in the most recent window.

  Note: If you have chosen to open pages in new tabs, Firefox will ignore this optionpreference and will open a new window from a link if the page author specified that the new window should have a specific size, because some pages can only be displayed correctly at a specific size.

  See Also

  How to change or reset an advanced setting in Firefox

• When you open a link, image or media in a new tab, switch to it immediately: When you middle-click on a Web link (or hold down CtrlCommand while clicking with the left mouse button), the page will be opened in a new tab. That new tab will be in the background (the selected tab will not change). The same thing happens when opening a web link, image or video in a new tab using the context menu. Check this setting to load and display the page in a new foreground tab instead.
• Confirm before closing multiple tabs: Select this setting to enable a warning dialog to confirm your choice to close a window with multiple tabs (shown below) to prevent accidentally closing the entire window when you only intend to close the current tab. To learn more, see How to configure Close Tab warnings in Firefox.

• (If applicable) Warn you when opening multiple tabs might slow down Firefox: This setting is only shown if you disabled the warning dialog Firefox displays to confirm your choice to open multiple tabs at once (shown below). Check this setting to re-enable the warning, to prevent accidentally slowing down Firefox while loading a large number of tabs.

• Use tabs to organize lots of websites in a single window
• Tab overview menu
• Tab context menu