How to Undo Firefox's "Close Tab Options" Changes?

July 08, 2020 TECH FIREFOX

Left: The new tab context menu in Firefox 78
Middle: The new tab context menu after adding extensions
Right: The new tab context menu after all changes (Also how the old menu looked)

When you right-click a tab, Firefox historically has had two options in the context menu that let you close multiple tabs at once: "Close Tabs to the Right" and "Close Other Tabs". These are self-explanatory and very useful buttons for people who do a lot of browsing and utilize both windows and tabs. However, in Firefox 78, Mozilla has moved these items into a submenu, largely eliminating their time-saving ability.

This was justified by worries that people were closing too many tabs accidentally. However, if you are one of the many people who liked the ease-of-use these buttons provide, it is possible to restore them.

The bulk of the work enabling one to do this was done by Michał Kopeć with his two extensions:

However, these extensions cannot simply undo the changes Mozilla has done. They simply readd the options to the bottom of the context menu, leading to this:

If you are happy with this, you can stop here and continue with your life. However, I was not. To move these items up to the old place and hide the new menu, I used a userChrome.css file. Getting this file created and positioned right takes a few minutes, but userChrome.org explains how better than I could. To summarize though:

Go to the URL about:support
Click "Open Folder" next to "Profile Folder" in the middle of the first table
Make a new folder called "chrome"
Make a file in that folder and name it "userChrome.css"
Put the code later in this post in that file (Or just download this one (right-click and hit "Save Link As..."))
Go to the URL about:config
Toggle toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets to true
Restart Firefox

As for what to put in your userChrome.css file, you will want to include the following styles:

/*** Undo "Close Tab Options" ***/
  /* Hide "Close Tab Options" menu */
  #context_closeTabOptions {
    display: none !important;
  }
  /* Move "Close Tab Options" items from extensions up to old positions */
  #context_undoCloseTab,
  #context_undoCloseTab ~ * {
    -moz-box-ordinal-group: 3;
  }
  #_588c6fa6-14f9-4826-b769-71a305c80bbb_-menuitem-_close_right {
    -moz-box-ordinal-group: 1;
  }
  #_a02f4411-7950-4b43-abcd-23a01a9ce719_-menuitem-_close_other_tabs {
    -moz-box-ordinal-group: 2;
  }
/*** End of: Undo "Close Tab Options" ***/

However, if these are the only extensions adding items to the tab context menu, you will be left with an ugly menuseparator left at the bottom of the context menu:

To fix this, you can add one more style to your userChrome.css:

/*** Hide Tab Context Menu's Last Menu Separator ***/
  #tabContextMenu > menuseparator:last-of-type {
    display: none !important;
  }
/*** End of: Hide Tab Context Menu's Last Menu Separator ***/

Or, again, you could just download this one by right-clicking and hitting "Save Link As...". Either way, once you have your userChrome.css file set up and Firefox configured, you should be able to restart it and see this:

Voila, just like before! (Until Mozilla breaks stuff again)

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