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Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 October 31

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October 31

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Firefox, give me back my preferences!

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After a crash, Firefox offered to restart in Safe mode – which, I find, meant trashing all my preferences and plugins. I'm restoring them a bit at a time, but I don't know what to do about these:

  • When I command-click a link to open in a new tab, the new tab appears immediately to the right of the active tab. I can understand that folks might reasonably prefer that, but I knowingly chose the other option, to put the new tab at the far right. Where is the checkbox?
  • Searches from the search box (in the toolbar) formerly opened in a new tab, now they open in the current tab. Intolerable!
  • Wikipedia's search box no longer suggests article titles.

This is Firefox 82.0.2 on MacOS. I don't know when it last updated. —Tamfang (talk) 04:37, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Those sound more like add-ons than options. If you open up your add-ons and search for the word "tabs" you'll get a whole pile of plug-ins for FF that alter the normal tab behaviour or provide other options. I didn't immediately find one that does what you're requesting, but there are literally dozens to look through. Similarly you can search for "search" or "Wikipedia" as well. Matt Deres (talk) 12:29, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Firefox is magnificently poor at recovering from computer crashes. Its file handling appears to be completely ignorant of ACID principles. My laptop crashes every now and then (old & heat intolerant (the laptop, not me (but also me))). Firefox loses history, preferences, bookmarks, extensions, extension settings (tampermonkey, uBlock, &c) and all that. I deal with it by taking frequent backups of my Firefox profile. 85.76.48.212 (talk) 17:23, 31 October 2020 (UTC)[reply]