The Tab tearing feature which allows moving a tab to a new window by dragging and dropping can now be disabled in Firefox 74 if you’ve found it annoying or caused an inconvenience to you.
An opened tab in Firefox can be brought into a new window by detaching it from the current tab strip. You can also right-click and select “Move to New Window” under the “Move tab” option in the context menu. If you’ve found it troublesome when in reordering tabs or other situations, Mozilla now finally offers a hidden pref to disable it in Firefox Nightly.
A bug reported 9 years ago with a request to provide an option to turn off tab tear-off has been fixed in Nightly.
“This problem occurred for me many times specially in my netbook. Sometimes I want to select an open tab between my open tabs. with default touch mouse plane of netbook) Firefox move that tab to a new window! Please add a feature to disable moving tabs to new window by drag /dropping them” a reporter asks.
Disable tab tearing or tab detaching in Firefox
1. Visit about:config
2. In the search box, type “detach” without quotes, for the highlighted results, toggle browser.tabs.allowTabDetach pref value to false.
If you’re using Firefox 72, you can install Disable Tab Detach addon, which could be redundant when Mozilla ships Firefox 74 with the above-mentioned option in about: config, which when toggled, blocks tabs from being torn or detached.
