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Firefox 68.0.1esr tabs below navigation

03 August 2019
Another Firefox update, another need to fix things that should not have broken in the first place — and once again it is the location of tabs. It seems that Mozilla still cannot get it into their thick skulls that some people do not want tabs running along the top, and instead like me want then below the navigation/bookmark bars as shown below.

Firefox tabs, as I like them

I have used some variant of the Noia theme for as long as I can remember, and at one time it was also available for Thunderbird. It is obviously popular enough that at least the buttons got recycled into something usable every time Mozilla decided to redesign the theming engine. Thankfully Slackware uses the esr releases so this sort of breakage only happens once a year or so.

Fixing the tabs

The approach is to grab the NoiaButtons theme and then graft in the tabs-at-bottom code from the Custom CSS for Firefox. This can be done by running the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/Aris-t2/NoiaButtons.git git clone https://github.com/Aris-t2/CustomCSSforFx.git cp CustomCSSforFx/classic/css/tabs/tabs_below_navigation_toolbar.css NoiaButtons/noiabuttons cp CustomCSSforFx/classic/css/tabs/tabs_below_navigation_toolbar_fx65.css NoiaButtons/noiabuttons cp CustomCSSforFx/classic/css/tabs/tabs_below_navigation_toolbar_fx68.css NoiaButtons/noiabuttons cd NoiaButtons/noiabuttons echo '@import "tabs_below_navigation_toolbar.css";' >> NoiaButtons/noiabuttons/userChrome.css echo '@import "tabs_below_navigation_toolbar_fx65.css";' >> NoiaButtons/noiabuttons/userChrome.css echo '@import "tabs_below_navigation_toolbar_fx68.css";' >> NoiaButtons/noiabuttons/userChrome.css

The contents of the NoiaButtons/noiabuttons can then be copied into the chrome folder within the Firefox profile, which will be something along the lines of ~/.mozilla/firefox/xxxxxxxx.default/. In my case I renamed the old one since the other fixes it contained I no longer required.

The problem of mouse clicks immediately triggering items within pop-up menus seems to have been fixed in Firefox. My own work-around was originally to shift some of the menu items, but later on I changed the CSS to move the entire menu so that the single fix would work for all pop-up menus rather than just the one used for link right-clicks. I suspect the latter is how Firefox themselves fixed the problem.

Shifted popup menu

Remarks

Although not as drastic as when Firefox 9 broke things Mozilla are still in the habbit of breaking things they really should leave alone. If it was not for the heroics of the person who maintains the Custom CSS stuff I probably would have ditched Firefox completely by now. Chrome/Chromium has its faults but at least they stay consistent.