Firefox has a mind of it's own.

July 16, 2009 10:47 AM

Why does Firefox randomly break out one of my tabs in a new window?

I usually keep several tabs opened at once, and since the 3.5 update I've been having problems, either when switching between windows or tabs, even sometimes when I'm placing the cursor in a text box. It doesn't happen every day but it's annoying the hell out of me. I thought it might be some kind of keyboard shortcut or some unknown mouse gesture that's doing it. So far my google-fu has failed me.

Using FF on WinXP

Any ideas?

posted by daHIFI to Technology (5 answers total)

I'm having a similar weird problem with the 3.5 upgrade - Google searches will often launch two new tabs instead of one. I've been looking for a patch but haven't found one yet.
posted by Lolie at 10:57 AM on July 16, 2009

Best answer: It's a feature called tear out Tabs (or something like that). If you click the tab and drag it away from the bar, it tears it out into a new window.
posted by Deflagro at 11:14 AM on July 16, 2009

Response by poster: I thought it might have been tear out tabs, but the few times I tried to do it on purpose it didn't work. Until just now. Thanks, I'll have to be more careful.
posted by daHIFI at 11:21 AM on July 16, 2009

Definitely tear out tabs. It seems to be fairly sensitive to clicking while moving the cursor. Hopefully they will introduce some adjustment parameter where you can specify the length of the click that triggers the feature.
posted by theDrizzle at 11:24 AM on July 16, 2009

Here is an add-on that will allow you to disable it. Also apparently there was a bug (489729) where when you click a tab once and then move your mouse down it could cause a new window to open.
posted by Deflagro at 12:07 PM on July 16, 2009 [3 favorites]