This was one of the those little things in software that bug me, but I don’t start looking for a solution right-away because of reasons like “I am too busy with something else”, or “The bug is not so bad.. let me see if I can live with it”.

But no .. this particular issue with how Firefox dealt with opening new tabs from links was now getting on my nerves.

The Issue #

While visiting a page, I typically middle-click on links so that they open in new tabs .. and I do that a lot! And this is the order of where the new tabs would open:

As you can see above, if I already have a bunch of links open (see the last row where “Tab 1”, “Tab 2” and “Tab 3” are already open), the last opened tab will land up between those tabs and a sea of other previously opened tabs! When you have over a dozen of tabs already open, hunting for the last opened tabs is really annoying.

Expected Behavior #

I would instead expect for each middle-click to open the new tab immediately to the right of the current tab. Below diagram shows it very clearly that this behavior would save me the exercise of hunting for that new tab.

False Leads #

So I searched online for “firefox new tab location” and similar search terms, and found Q&A on Mozilla Support like How do I make tabs open on the right by default? and New tabs ALWAYS open to the right of the last open tab, not to the right of current tab.

The “Chosen solutions” for both of these issues suggested setting browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent = true and browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent = true (which is the default) in the Firefox about:config.

Setting browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent = true affected the “new tab opening” behavior when opening only blank new tabs using Ctrl+T or hitting the “New Tab” button. This setting had nothing to do with the location of new tabs opened by the “Open Link in New Tab” or “middle-click on link” action.

Firefox Bug # 1485683 #

After scouring through many search results, I landed up on Firefox Bug # 1485683: browser.tab.insertaftercurrent order which reported the exact same issue I was seeing 🎉.

So I replied to that bug thread confirming that I still saw that issue on Firefox 101.0.1 .. 4 years later .. just in case that motivates someone to still fix it.

But my issue isn’t fixed yet.

Solution #

Finally, the Open Tabs Next to Current (repo) Firefox Add-on saved the day!

The introduction of this add-on incorrectly states this:

After the addition of the browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent setting in about:config you do not need this extension anymore.

But I still tried installing it to see .. just in case .. 🤞 ..

I could finally get new tabs to open in the order as shown in the Expected Tab Order figure above 😂.

Thank you Sebastian Blask for Open Tabs Next to Current!

I am writing this post to share this wonderful browser add-on Unclutter (available for both Firefox and Chrome) by Peter Hagen. I discovered this a few days back on Hacker News. But given how awesome this add-on is, I am surprised that the HN post didn’t gain any traction.

I’ll quickly post the important links related to this add-on, and then briefly list few points on why I like it.

Why? #

I use Firefox as my primary browser. If you are too, you might be wondering “why install this add-on when Firefox already has a Reader View”.

Here are my reasons:

1. You do not lose the article’s origin style!
2. The Unclutter author Peter Hagen was super-responsive when I opened an issue on his repo. This add-on did not work well on one of the pages on this site, but he fixed it in less than 24 hours!
3. This website shows an outline on the side, but many websites don’t. Unclutter adds a similar outline for any page where it’s enabled.
4. Unclutter can be auto-enabled for your chosen sites. For example, ever since I have discovered this add-on, I have auto-enabled it on https://www.masteringemacs.org.
5. You can customize a key-binding or shortcut to toggle this add-on. For now, I am keeping the default binding Alt + C.
6. The subtle animation you see when enabling/disabling this add-on is pretty cool.
7. Like the Firefox built-in Reader View, Unclutter also removes distractions – So no ads or pop-ups!

It has other features like annotating pages with your notes privately and displaying comments from Hacker News and Hypothes.is, but I don’t use those.

Caveat #

While viewing a page with Unclutter enabled, there are no issues. But I have noticed that if I toggle it off, the original CSS gets broken. This issue is tracked on its repo. Until this gets fixed, a quick workaround is to do Ctrl + F5 (force reload the page and thus its CSS too) after disabling Unclutter.

Closing #

But this minor issue doesn’t prevent it from making it my default “reader view” app on Firefox.

I’ll end this post with a before and after when visiting this page. Feel free to click those images to view them in higher resolution.