Am I Having Another Senior Moment? Firefox Tabs Lost X's

[BobH]

Have I lost my mind - again? (If anyone finds one very worn, used and ragged, please PM me. I'll gladly pay for shipping.)

Lately Fx 4.0.1 has had me frazzled and I couldn't figure out why. Today, after having just closed a tab in Thunderbird I came over to Fx and realized that there are no little X's in the right corner of tabs as there are in Tb. I'd swear that Fx used to have 'em and now they don't. I have to right click then select and click "close" to close a tab in Fx. Whazzup widdat den?

They didn't tell me that it was gonna be like this when I got old.

[jscher2000]

For a few versions now there has been a preference you could set in about:config. Not sure if these might have changed in Fx4 but you could take a look.

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.tabs.closeButtons" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[HansV]

Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
Scroll down to browser.tabs.closeButtons.
If the value of this option is other than 1, double-click it and set it to 1, then click OK.

0 = Display a close button on the active tab only
1 = Display close buttons on all tabs
2 = Don’t display any close buttons
3 = Display a single close button at the end of the tab strip (Firefox 1.x behavior)

[BobH]

Thanks for the responses.

I followed the instructions to find what the settings are in my prefs file and found this: "browser.tabs.closeButtons;1".

If I understand correctly, the value "1" means that every tab should have the little x. None do.

I think I'm going to file a bug report with Mozilla.

[HansV]

Whether each tab displays a close button depends on the number of open tabs and the width of the Firefox window. If the width of the individual tabs drops below 140 pixels or so, only the active tab displays a close button; above that, all tabs display a close button.

[BobH]

Hello Hans!

I respect what you say; however none of the tabs shows an "X" no matter how many or how few tabs I have open.

[BobH]

I posted my situation on the Mozilla Firefox forum and received this response from dfoulkes:

I would start Firefox in safe-mode to make sure that an extension isn't over-riding that in some way.
This is only for Firefox safe-mode...Don't check off any of it's safe-mode boxes...
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Safe_Mode" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I then opened Fx in Safe Mode as suggested and the X's returned in all tabs. I guess now I have to find out which add-on is causing them to disappear.

[BobH]

OK! Now I've disabled all the extensions and plug-ins and restarted Fx but the X's are still missing.

I think I'm going to uninstall and reinstall Fx from a fresh download and see if the X's come back. If they do not, I can only assume that there is a problem with some option in the prefs file.

More later.

[BobH]

It worked. The X's are back.

[PaulB]

Lately Fx 4.0.1 has had me...

Glad you resolved your problem. But you have left me . Do you really have Fx 4.0.1? I have 4.0 with no updates available.

[BobH]

Here's what my Help/About shows.

[Bigaldoc]

Need to figure this one out! Me too, Paul: I've got 4.0 and no updates available, so I checked the Mozilla site and it also offers to download 4.0 (says nothing about 4.0.1).

Bob, you been doing some Mozilla programming you're not telling us about?     (Then again, everything's bigger in Texas, right?)

[BobH]

I was a 4.0 Beta user for Mozilla. Maybe that's why I have a 4.0.1 version.

I don't recall anything about it when I installed this release, though. I thought I had returned to a GA release.

[PaulB]

Perplexing. I thought it may have been a Win XP (which BobH appears to be using) vs. a Win 7 (which I use) issue, but maybe not. Which OS are you using, Big Al?

[jscher2000]

The ftp server doesn't have a 4.0.1 release (yet): http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/ ... /releases/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Argus]

I was a 4.0 Beta user for Mozilla. Maybe that's why I have a 4.0.1 version.

Once a beta tester always a beta tester.

Must be a beta. Check the build.

It, 4.0.1 beta (RC?), could be found on FTP, nightly; when released to the general beta testers, around mid April.

I think beta testers got it automatically; different "release channels". (You will have to uninstall and install the release version to leave that group.)
https://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4 ... easenotes/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Then depending on how it was installed I guess it would end up in a different folder than the release version.

Anyhow, it can't be far away now; it could be close to the release of 4.0.1 now, perhaps this week, perhaps today, perhaps next week; who knows, it seemed like they had a few more things to do earlier.

[TonyE]

4.0.1 was released to those on the beta update channel on 15th April. It is due to be officially released on 28th April, along with Firefox 3.5.19, Firefox 3.6.17, Thunderbird 3.1.10, SeaMonkey 2.0.14 and Firefox 4.0.1 for mobile.

[Bigaldoc]

Perplexing. I thought it may have been a Win XP (which BobH appears to be using) vs. a Win 7 (which I use) issue, but maybe not. Which OS are you using, Big Al?

I'm still using mostly XP MCE although I also have Win 7 but don't use it much.

[BobH]

Perplexing. I thought it may have been a Win XP (which BobH appears to be using) vs. a Win 7 (which I use) issue, but maybe not. Which OS are you using, Big Al?

I'm still using mostly XP MCE although I also have Win 7 but don't use it much.

Yes, I'm still using XP SP3. Have seen no reason to make Microsofat stockholders richer in the newer version. In fact, I bought a machine with Vista on it an replaced it with XP.

As for the Fx version, I have to assume that I'm still on a beta release; but the Help/About panel says nothing about it being beta nor does it have a build number associated with it. Whatever the case, it has been stable and works as advertised except for the loss of the X's (which has been overcome and which I can't associate with the new version).

[Argus]

[...] but the Help/About panel says nothing about it being beta [...]

Nor did the Release Candidate of 4.0.