thisTab! - a Mozilla Firefox extension

I really hate it when websites don’t give you any warning of links which will open in a new window. A lot of sites provide a little icon, or a small superscript comment, or even a tooltip. However, some don’t.

The one site that really annoyed me was Google’s GMail. I always like to keep the left-most tab in firefox on my Google Personalised Home. When a message arrives, I click the GMail header and am consequently presented with the GMail Inbox. Perfect.

In the top-left corner of the GMail homepage is a link back to Google Home (whether personalised or not - it ‘knows’) which opens in a new window. Which is very frustrating if you have lots of tabs open in the current window. After looking for an ‘Open in this tab’ extension and failing to find one, I decided to create my own.

Enter thisTab! - a Mozilla Firefox extension to override the behaviour for a link which uses the target=’_blank’ parameter to open a new window. Note that this won’t work with javascript popup links.

thisTab! screenshot

As this is my first foray into any kind of ‘plugin’ development, I’d love to know what people think.

5 Comments »

Hey, thanks for “This Tab”!

I thought I would submit a feature request here, since it doesn’t work on my least favorite banking website, where the submit button is an image:

http://hsbc.co.uk/1/2/personal/pib-home

the relevant code is:

Doug

Comment by Doug Held — July 10, 2006 @ 11:22 am

Hi,
I am very glad to have found this extension. But it seems that the current version (1.0) doesn’t support firefox 2.0
I can only ask that you please consider making your extension ff2.0 compatible.
Thanks.

Comment by SiriusB — January 22, 2007 @ 2:18 pm

OK I’ve updated it to version 2.0, which supports FF2, you can download from here

Comment by James Booker — January 24, 2007 @ 7:13 pm

Just to say this extension is still incredibly useful and I find it quite surprising that Firefox’s context menu doesn’t have a method of opening new-window links in the current tab!

But your release is only rated for Firefox 2. It’s easy to edit install.rdf to update for Firefox 3+ and it works just fine, so *please* consider updating your release package for everyone who might not be able to do this.

Thanks again for a great little plugin!

Comment by Cirieno — December 10, 2008 @ 1:53 pm

@Cirieno - thanks for your comment. I’ve updated the project page with a new version for download that supports FF3. I’ve not updated the Mozilla add-ons site yet though!

Comment by James Booker — January 21, 2009 @ 3:42 pm

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