HOEI

I recently upgraded one of my laptops to Firefox version 2.0. This upgrade left me with a very weird Firefox startup issue. I suspected that maybe the startup defaults were different for this new version of Firefox. I knew there was an option for starting Firefox with all the same windows and tabs from the precious session, but that was not what I was experiencing. I was seeing the same thing every time I started Firefox regardless of how many tabs or windows were open during the previous session. Then checked my browser settings and found that there were eight URLs in the “Home Page” field on the Tools/Options/Startup screen. Each URL was separated by pipe character.

This image is an example of what it looked like. You can click the image to see a large view. The next thing that popped into my mind after finding this was to ask myself if this was a feature or a bug. I decided to exercise my searching skills to see what came up. I searched on: “firefox open multiple tabs on startup” and found my answer in the first result. The first hit took me to “The Sukhbir” blog where the explanation was given as follows:

“Load all the favorite pages in separate tabs. Then choose:

Tools> Options> General Tab> Homepage – Locations(s) > Use Current Page

Using this, Firefox will load all the current open pages on startup.”

So what this means is that you will get every single open tab added to the “Home Page” field in Firefox (plus some pipe character delimiters if you have more than one tab open) when you choose the “Use Current Pages” button in the Firefox version 2.0.0.4 startup options.

Obviously I did not realize this new “feature” existed until after this little incident. I normally would like to start Firefox with my iGoogle page as the first thing I see. Now that I understand this cool new feature I will rethink my Firefox startup options. Much like many other power surfers, bloggers, and web site developers, I do quickly end up with nearly a dozen windows and tabs in several browsers for various reasons. While Firefox is by far my bowser of choice, I do use many other browsers including Netscape, Mozilla, Internet Explorer, and Opera on a weekly basis. I will have to review my history to see what sites I open most frequently and then add them to my startup options.

Interestingly enough the third result from the Google search mentioned above led me to tech-recipes where I learned that there is a similar feature in Microsoft’s IE7 (with the new tabbed browsing feature). Since I have not bothered to upgrade a single PC in my house to Internet Explorer 7, I had no clue. I have used IE7 on a machine or two at work, but that is normally when sitting at a co-worker’s desk helping with a problem. This all made me wonder who came up with this idea first. I think it is Microsoft who can claim this feature first, but that is pure speculation. I could not find a reference in the Mozilla Firefox release notes back through version 2.0 where this feature was added. It seems to have quietly arrived on the scene since the last time the Firefox Help pages were updated on mozilla.org. I pulled a screen capture to show what I am referring to. You will notice the “s” missing from the “Use Current Page” button. The button on Firefox Version 2.0.0.4 reads “Use Current Pages”. If you know when Firefox actually added this feature then please let me know. I am curious who came up with this first. For all I know it may have been standard on something other than Firefox or IE for a while.