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Tab dragging broken in Firefox 8+?

Update (2011-10-04): this bug is now fixed in the development version of Tab Mix Plus.

This post in a nutshell: disable the Tab Mix Plus extension.

Since a month or two, tab dragging (drag and drop to move the tabs around each others, but also to move a tab into a new window) has been broken in the Firefox versions I use (Nightly 8 then 9, but also Aurora 8). I lived with that for a while because I was using mainly Opera for tab-intensive browsing, but eventually got too pissed-off with it not to try and deal with it.
Searching about that didn’t yield any useful results. At first I found this remarkably unhelpful post on Ubuntu forums, showing how Linux guys like to give answers in form of a riddle (“see solution code [FOT002] in that 51 pages long thread”) instead of a straight answer (direct link to the mentioned solution, anyone?). I eventually manage to find what this solution referred to (not by finding that solution, but by finding someone who mentioned how applying it failed), it doesn’t work.
Then I found a very old post about tab dragging in Firefox 1.0 and 1.5. It was referring to TabBrowser Preferences: apparently, by the time of Fx 1.0, tab dragging was only available through the TabBrowser Preferences extension, whereas it was implemented natively into Fx 1.5. So I thought maybe there’s some interference between TabBrowser Preferences (or rather, its successor Tab Mix Plux) and tab dragging. Indeed, disabling it fixed the issue. Note that if you do and were using the session restore feature of Tab Mix Plus, you’ll want to re-enable Firefox’s session restore functionality: it’s in Options => General => Startup => “When Nightly starts” => Show my windows and tabs from last time.

Posted in Firefox.


8 Responses

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  1. FS says

    Tab dragging is fixed in the development version of Tab Mix Plus.

  2. patheticcockroach says

    Thanks for the info. I’ve actually learned to live without Tab Mix Plus, since my 3 only uses for it were:

    • to customize tab width: done manually by adding this to userChrome.css:
      .tabbrowser-tab[fadein]:not([pinned]) {
      min-width: 15px !important;
      max-width: 250px !important;
      }
    • to restore sessions: the built-in session restore is actually good enough
    • to remove various things from the tab bar: those settings survived the deactivation of Tab Mix Plus

    So as of today, I have no reason to reactivate it (the fewer add-ons the better ^^), still it’s good to know that it’s fixed 🙂

  3. jseger9000 says

    Doesn’t seem fixed to me. I was wondering why I couldn’t drag tabs in FF8. After reading this, I disabled Tab Mix Plus (0.3.8.6) and hey, tab dragging is restored. Reactivated TMP and boom, broken tab dragging.

  4. patheticcockroach says

    I guess maybe you could try the development version, 0.3.8.7pre, there. However the changelog doesn’t mention tab dragging. I didn’t try it though, as I said I’m living without it for the moment.

  5. b says

    It is working with the dev version above ! Thanks a lot

  6. Alex says

    I have the same problem in FF 8, but I don’t have Tab Mix Plus. In fact never heard of it until now! So as far as I understand, if I don’t have TMP, my tabs dragging should work, but it doesn’t. Anybody has any idea why? Thanks!

  7. patheticcockroach says

    I’m currently using the 11.x nightly, and I don’t have this issue anymore. To see if this might be related to an add-on, you could create a new profile with no add-ons (just run “firefox –profilemanager’ and create a new profile, you can easily delete it later). And then reinstall the add-ons one by one and see when it breaks. I’m afraid this kind of issue is often a bit tedious to debug.

  8. Alex says

    It looks like my tabs dragging started to work again, before trying anything to fix it! I don’t know what happened, but I hope it will stay this way. Thank you for your time.



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