Open All In Tabs in Firefox 3.0

How to make "Open All in Tabs" in Firefox close existing tabs?

Firefox 2 has an option to close or leave open existing tabs when you select the "Open All in Tabs" menu item for a folder of bookmarks on the bookmarks toolbar. The option is pretty easy to set:

1. Open a blank tab, and enter about:config in the address bar.
2. Find the browser.tabs.LoadFolderAndReplace setting.
3. Double-click the setting to toggle it between true and false.

"true" causes Firefox to close the current tab(s) and replace them with tabs for the selected group of bookmarks. "false" causes Firefox to add tabs for the group to the currently open tab(s). You have to restart firefox to have a change take effect.

Unfortunately, Firefox 3 does not respect this setting, and always behaves as if the option was false. Bummer!

But today I found a sort-of workaround: Hold down the Shift key when selecting the menu option. This opens a new window with only the new tabs. Sure, the old window is still open in the background. But, at least your current window doesn't just keep accumulating tabs.

Actually, there are two versions of this workaround. The first is fastest, if you know ahead of time that you want open the folder of bookmarks in a new window. Just hold down the Shift key and click on the name of the folder in the bookmarks toolbar. Voila! The entire folder of bookmarks is loaded into a new window.

The second is if you want to peek into the folder before opening a new window. First, click on the folder to display a menu of its contents. If you like what you see, then hold down the shift key when selecting "Open All in Tabs". Ta da! Success. Okay, not complete success, but a decent workaround.

Hopefully, the Firefox 3 development team will make FF3 respect the browser.tabs.LoadFolderAndReplace setting. But till then, I hope this workaround helps.