Patrick in Spain

As most techy people did, I updated to Firefox 3.5 when the stable version was released. (I also keep a copy of the latest trunk version, but I wouldn’t typically blog about its bugs). I updated my addons and went back about my business. Well, I’ve been browsing for a while now, and I finally got annoyed with the fact that Firefox was no longer prompting me when I closed multiple tabs. That is to say that I use the hotkey cmd+w (ctrl+w on Windows) to close tabs. Well, on Mac cmd+q quits the application. You can see my frustration when I accidentally close all my tabs and lose everything I was doing when I just wanted to close a single tab. After losing all my tabs a second time, I finally decided to investigate and fix it. I found these two articles which led me to some semblance of an answer.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/06/19/firefox-3-doesnt-prompt-or-warn-to-confirm-when-closing-multiple-tabs-as-warning-not-working/

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=419009

I knew about the settings in the Firefox > Preferences menu (Tools > Options on Windows), but changing them seemed to have no effect. I disabled Tab Mix Plus, one of my favorite Addons for Firefox, because I thought it might be hampering the normal fox behavior, but that didn’t work either. Finally, I went in about:config and manually changed the configuration values. Whenever I close my browser, I like to have all my history, cookies, and cache cleared just because I don’t mind retyping my passwords, and I find it keeps Firefox running in ship shape. Firefox, however, seems to be moving in the direction of not having you clear things and just restoring everything you were previously doing when you closed it. That doesn’t work for me. Anyway, here’s the settings I set:

Open a new tab and go to about:config. Accept the warning if you see it.
In the filter box type browser.warn and set both browser.warnOnQuit and browser.warnOnRestart to true.
Next, put browser.startup.page in the filter and set its value to 1

I realize you’re supposed to be able to control all these settings from the preferences menu, but changing everything in the menu seemed to have no effect for me when I did it, which may be the real bug here. Hopefully this helps.

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