Reuse existing tabs in Firefox?

January 27, 2007 6:30 PM

Can I make Firefox 2 for Mac open URL's called by an external application like NetNewsWire by reusing an existing open tab with the same URL, instead of opening a new tab?

I don't understand this behavior being a default, as I don't see why I would need a new tab with Metafilter, instead of merely reloading the existing tab. It's irritating, and searching using terms like tabs safari firefox reload doesn't exactly narrow down my choices.

posted by dglynn to technology (7 comments total)

You might want to request this feature from the developer of Tab Mix Plus or one of the many other tab-related add-ons for Firefox.

(I prefer the way Safari handles this, too)
posted by bcwinters at 6:54 PM on January 27, 2007

hooray! I was just waiting for a tip like this to fall into my lap.
posted by jepler at 8:19 PM on January 27, 2007

I'm glad it's not just me.

Does anyone have any idea why this might be the preferred behavior? I find it counter intuitive and a wasteful of valuable space on the tab bar.

Maybe I just got in the habit of having certain tabs open from network monitoring and then translated that into leaving MeFi and other sites on open tabs and just reloading them when I noticed anything interesting in NetNewsWire. Having another tab open just seems weird, but maybe there is some more efficient way that takes advantage of such behavior, and I'm just too ingrained in my old ways to notice it.

I just can't imagine any circumstance where I would want a new tab with the same URL as an existing tab instead of reloading the existing tab.
posted by dglynn at 9:00 PM on January 27, 2007

#dglynn: I just can't imagine any circumstance where I would want a new tab with the same URL as an existing tab instead of reloading the existing tab.

Well I sometimes have two windows, each with lots of tabs, and sometimes I have the same url open as a tab in each window. (logically the 2 windows represent sets of related urls and the shared url is a member of both sets)

In Safari, what happens when you externally open a url that already appears more than once?
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 10:16 PM on January 27, 2007

It is not precisely what you're seeking, but Tab Mix Plus does have an option to open duplicated tabs next to the original. This would offer more tidy cleanup of duplicates, I imagine.
posted by WCityMike at 7:52 AM on January 28, 2007

MonkeySaltedNuts: It looks to me like it reloads the most-recently-loaded tab containing the site in the frontmost window. But I didn't test the possibilities exhaustively.
posted by bcwinters at 1:30 PM on January 28, 2007

So the general consensus seems to be that it isn't possible currently, and in fact the rest of the world gets along with the default behavior as it is just fine, correct?

Interesting that Safari and Firefox would have such different defaults, and while Firefox has an immense pile of customization software, there is apparently no pent up demand for this one trait.

Fascinating, Jim.
posted by dglynn at 8:27 PM on January 28, 2007