Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2020 October 31

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October 31

Firefox, give me back my preferences!

After a crash, Firefox offered to restart in Safe mode – which, I find, meant trashing all my preferences and plugins. I'm restoring them a bit at a time, but I don't know what to do about these:

• When I command-click a link to open in a new tab, the new tab appears immediately to the right of the active tab. I can understand that folks might reasonably prefer that, but I knowingly chose the other option, to put the new tab at the far right. Where is the checkbox?
• Searches from the search box (in the toolbar) formerly opened in a new tab, now they open in the current tab. Intolerable!
• Wikipedia's search box no longer suggests article titles.

This is Firefox 82.0.2 on MacOS. I don't know when it last updated. —Tamfang (talk) 04:37, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Those sound more like add-ons than options. If you open up your add-ons and search for the word "tabs" you'll get a whole pile of plug-ins for FF that alter the normal tab behaviour or provide other options. I didn't immediately find one that does what you're requesting, but there are literally dozens to look through. Similarly you can search for "search" or "Wikipedia" as well. Matt Deres (talk) 12:29, 31 October 2020 (UTC)

Firefox is magnificently poor at recovering from computer crashes. Its file handling appears to be completely ignorant of ACID principles. My laptop crashes every now and then (old & heat intolerant (the laptop, not me (but also me))). Firefox loses history, preferences, bookmarks, extensions, extension settings (tampermonkey, uBlock, &c) and all that. I deal with it by taking frequent backups of my Firefox profile. 85.76.48.212 (talk) 17:23, 31 October 2020 (UTC)