Not sure when Mozilla removed the ‘Tabs on Top’ option from the Toolbars sub-menu (View > Toolbars) but it is gone for sure in new installs of Firefox 14/15. You can however, still turn off the Tabs on Top option (but the UI is looks a bit odd) via about:config setting:
- Open a new tab. In the address bar type about:config and press enter
- (If applicable) Click on the I’ll be careful, I promise… button
- In the filter box type browser.tabs.onTop
- Double click on the entry below to change the setting to false
- Close the tab
Update: After some testing it appears the ‘Tabs on Top’ menu option is missing if it is a fresh install of Firefox. On the laptop I put a new install of Firefox 14 on about 3-weeks ago and then updated this week to Firefox 15. On the Ultimate machine I just did a fresh install of Firefox 15 and ran it with a new profile and the option is not there. Also noticed it missing from the latest 64-Bit Windows Nightly which I did fresh install of within the past couple months.
Hi. It This setting is only missing, if you have, before you update,
set to show the Tabs on top. I have set to show the tabs under
the Nav-bar so this option is still available after the update to
Firefox 15.
Cheers
Endor
Thank you very much for these directions. I just made the switch to Firefox with version 15, and the tabs on top have been driving me crazy!
Perfect. Creating “browser.tabs.onTop” as a boolean value in about:config moved the tabs back to where I like them.
The same thing is true for the ‘close window when last tab is closed’ option that used to be in earlier versions of Firefox. The default behaviour is to close Firefox when the last tab is closed, which is annoying especially if you use keyboard shortcuts or mouse gestures and don’t always realise that you only have one tab open. You can change this in the same way as above, simply search for browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab in the about:config page as above and toggle it to False.
I love firefox for its extensions but hate the GUI designers who rate design over ergonomics.
Tabs to me relate to the contents of the window like nothing else, thus they should appear right on top of the contents and I am glad that setting the tab bar position is still available.
The URL and search box are more losely coupled and should not separate the tab bar from the content window.
I couldn’t live without tab mix plus though which easily enables me to bind all popups to tabs, keep the browser window open when closing the last tab, open new tabs next to the current tab and also get an extra close tab button so that I can quickly close multiple related tabs by just clicking on the same spot multiple times and many things more.
Thanks for this. I just finished updating a friend’s five year old Vista OS laptop, which included a fresh install of Firefox. The tab on top was really irritating. This is a perfect fix and very much appreciated.
Just did this on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit running Firefox 18.0.1, you prevented a major headache, literally, since this was stressing me out. Thanks for taking the time to share this information
This helps a lot. Thanks!!!!