Firefox 4: Disable Scrolling Tabs

Firefox 4 was launched a few days ago after staying in beta phases for months. There have been several internal and cosmetic changes that have been introduced in the stable version of Firefox 4. One such innovative change is the addition of Scrolling Tab Feature.

Scrolling tab feature kicks in when you have opened 14 or more tabs in Firefox simultaneously. While all browsers would reduce the tab size to minimum to accommodate as many tabs as possible in the main window itself, Firefox 4 puts to use the Tab Scroll Feature, where it shows a scroll bar on both ends of the tab bar. Quite innovative isn’t it?

However some of the users still prefer it the old way. They would like to disable tab scrolling in Firefox 4 completely. So how do they do it?  Here’s how.

Earlier Advanced users disabled Tab Scrolling in Firefox by editing the about: config settings for the feature “browsers.tab.tabMinWidth”. But after the release of Firefox 4: Beta 2, the settings for this feature was removed.

As a result we will have to install an add-on to configure or remove Tab Scrolling in Firefox 4. Here are the detailed steps.

Step 1: Install the Extension Custom Tab Width from Here and Restart your browser.

Step 2: Click on Tools in Menu Bar and then click Add-ons to go to the Add-ons Manager of Firefox 4.

Step 3: Click on Extension and find Custom Tab Width.

Step 4: Click on Options and enter the minimum value to 1 and click Ok.

Step 5: Close the Extension Manager.

So that’s how you remove the tab scrolling feature from Mozilla Firefox 4.