Disable Tabs in Firefox
Published: March 31, 2025
In early 2025, I opted to disable tab usage in my browser. This came as a result of my tendency to hoard tabs for later viewing. I kept finding myself with 200+ tabs open, and would end up spending a chunk of a weekend afternoon going through them. This was not much of an issue back in the day (circa 2005-2009), but it's gotten quite bad over time, likely due to how the Web has changed and become more distracting and addictive.
As such, I opted to channel my IE6 days, and disable them entirely. Not only did this solve the issue immediately, I found it incredibly easy to get accustomed to once again. I have no intention of going back, and if you'd like to do the same, then below will show you how.
Disable Tabs
For some reason, Firefox does not seem to provide a way to disable tabs, not even in about:config. As such, you will need to install a browser plugin.
This is a good one that I found. It is an incredibly simple script, and its non-obfuscated source code is available for vetting, so you can see it's not doing anything shady. Literally just forces new tabs to open in new windows instead.
Disable Tab Bar
Obviously, without the ability to use tabs, it's a bit ridiculous to keep the tab bar around. Once again, Firefox does not expose a straightforward way to do this. Instead, we need to use a user stylesheet to get rid of it. Below are the steps to do this.
Step 01: Go to about:config (enter it in your URL bar). From there, search for the entry toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets and set it to true. If it doesn't exist, then create it as a boolean.
Step 02: Open your Firefox profile folder. This can be found by going to about:support (enter it in your URL bar) and find the "Profile Folder" entry.
Step 03: In your profile folder, check for a folder called chrome. If it doesnt exist, then create it.
Step 04: In the chrome create a file called userChrome.css (or open it if it exists already). Within that file, add the following CSS:
#TabsToolbar
{
visibility: collapse;
}Step 05: With this all done, restart Firefox, and the tab bar should be gone.
Other Configuration Recommendations
Show the menu bar: Right click on top area of browser and check "Menu Bar." Without the tab bar, the browser looks a bit sad, so the menu bar helps to beef it up again.
Show the home icon:
Without being able to open new tabs, the home button becomes much more useful. But, it doesn't seem to exist by default anymore. So, to add it back:
- Click the top-right hamburger menu, select "More tools" and then "Customize toolbar..."
- Find "Home" icon and drag/drop it to the right of the refresh button
Also, while you're in there, I recommend checking "Title Bar" in bottom left corner as well. Like adding the menu bar, it helps it look a little less sad. Plus, I never really liked the removal of the title bar, anyway, but that's just me.
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