Hardscrabble 🍫

By Max Jacobson

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pro tip open firefox tabs in background

September 8, 2015

One good thing to know if you’re a firefox person: visit about:config and poke around, configuring things.

Here’s what happened today: I was watching a youtube video while browsing Twitter via Tweetbot. I clicked a link, which opened a new tab, pushing my video into the background. I diligently clicked the video’s tab to bring it back to the foreground so I could continue passively watching it while browsing twitter.

Then I clicked another link, and instinctively clicked the video’s tab to bring it back into the foreground again.

By the third time I did this, I realized I really wished there was a setting to automatically open tabs in the background. I tried googling it, but wasn’t really finding anything. So I checked about:config and searched through for “background”. The screen is a list of every configuration you can control. Many of them are boolean attributes, which can be toggled by simply double clicking the attribute.

I saw one, browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground;false and thought “hmm, maybe?” At this point, I’m not certain there’s even a configuration that does this, but I try toggling it… and … click a link from a tweet… and…

It did what I wanted. Sweet.

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