Making Firefox open new tabs where I expect

I keep a lot of tabs open. Probably too many. I also lean on pinned tabs for the handful of things I always have running, like email and my calendar. The trouble is what happens when I open a new tab: instead of landing at the far right where I go looking for it, it would often appear at the far left, wedged in right after my pinned tabs. With a busy tab strip that’s just enough friction to be annoying every single time.

After some digging in about:config, I’ve settled on three settings that get the behaviour I want:

browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent              false
browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrentExceptPinned  true
browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent       true

To change them, open about:config, search for each name in turn, and set the value. Two of these are actually Firefox’s defaults; the third is the one that fixes my real gripe. It’s worth walking through what each one does, because they only make sense together.

Opening a blank tab

When I open a fresh, empty tab with Cmd+T or the + button, I want it at the far right, on the end of the strip. That’s browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent left at its default of false. With dozens of tabs open, a new blank tab belongs at the end where there’s room, not shoved into the middle next to whatever I happened to be looking at.

Opening a link from a normal page

When I open a link in a new tab, by middle-clicking or using Open Link in New Tab, it opens immediately to the right of the tab I opened it from. That’s browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent set to true, also a default.

This one I genuinely want. If I’m reading an article and open three links from it, they line up right next to that article rather than scattering to the far end. The new tabs are clearly related to where they came from, and when I’m done I can close the little cluster without hunting around.

Opening a link from a pinned tab

Here’s the setting that does the real work: browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrentExceptPinned, set to true.

A pinned tab counts as the current tab, so the “related after current” rule above would happily drop a new tab right after my pinned tabs, at the far left. That was the exact behaviour driving me up the wall. This setting carves out an exception: when the current tab is pinned, send the new tab to the far right end instead of crowding it in beside the pinned ones.

The result is that my pinned tabs stay a tidy, fixed cluster on the left, and anything I open from them shows up on the right where I’d naturally look. Best of both worlds!

The catch: these don’t sync

There’s one real frustration. I use Firefox Sync to keep most of my setup consistent across devices, extensions especially, and it does a great job. But about:config preferences like these aren’t part of what it syncs. Set them up on one machine and you’re starting from scratch on the next.

So every time I set up Firefox somewhere new, I’m back to hunting through about:config from memory. That’s exactly the kind of repetitive, easy-to-forget setup my dotfiles repo exists to handle, and I’m exploring whether I can manage these preferences from there instead, most likely through a user.js file dropped into the profile. I’ll write that up separately if I land on something that works.

For now though, my tabs finally open where I expect them to. Small win, daily payoff.