Firefox 78: Mozilla moves “Close other Tabs” & “Close tabs to Right” to a submenu again, how to revert?

Mozilla has made unnecessary changes to the Firefox Tab Context menu yet again for one more time. The company has moved “Close Tabs to the Right” and “Close Other Tabs” options to a “Close Multiple Tabs” submenu in Firefox 78. This article discusses the change and includes a workaround that reverts that change to a certain extent.

Mozilla is currently facing backlash from users over the revamped address bar design (known as Megabar) in the Firefox browser.

The company now adding fuel to the fire by making changes that were withdrawn earlier.

Back in October 2018, Firefox version 64 received Move Tab, Select All Tabs, and a Close Tab Options sub-menu (with Close other Tabs and Close tabs to the Right).

After receiving reports and feedback from users that close other tabs option is hidden in the menu, Mozilla restored the two menu items in the following Firefox 65 release.

New “Close Multiple Tabs” submenu introduced

Now, to make it easy to restore closed multiple tabs, Firefox now shows the “Undo Close Tabs” option in place of the Undo Close Tab when you perform the operation.

For this change, the new “Close Multiple Tabs” sub-menu has been created and the two close tab options have been moved into it. The issue has been targetted for Firefox 78, which is currently in Beta, and changes are already live in the browser.

Here is the rationale behind the change:

If you right-click and select Close other tabs, all tabs will be closed. It is a cumbersome task to restore multiple tabs by selecting Undo Close Tab option.

There is a workaround to undo this and show tab close options again, but this requires creating userchrome.css file, and, the options won’t appear unless you hover over.

Move Close Tabs to the Right and Close other Tabs out of sub-menu in Firefox

1. Launch Firefox, visit about:support or click on Menu > Help and select “Troubleshooting Information”.

2. Click “Open profile folder”

3. Create a new folder called “chrome”

4. Open notepad and copy and paste the following CSS rules into it

/* Values for spacing of items */
:root {
--userCloseTabItems: 2;
--userCloseTabMenuItemHeight: 1.7em;
--userTabContextMenuWidth: 178px;
}

/* Hide "Close Tab Options" label/icon */
#context_closeTabOptions > label,
#context_closeTabOptions > hbox {
display: none !important;
}

/* Make space to inline the menu */
#context_closeTabOptions {
height: calc(var(--userCloseTabItems) * var(--userCloseTabMenuItemHeight));
}

/* Move "Close Tab Options" menu items into menu
BUG: MUST HOVER TO VIEW ITEMS */
#context_closeTabOptions > menupopup {
display: -moz-popup !important;
-moz-appearance: none !important;
visibility: visible !important;
border: none !important;
box-shadow: none !important;
margin-inline-start: calc(3.4px - var(--userTabContextMenuWidth)) !important;
margin-top: 0 !important;
}

/* Hide scroll triangles */
#context_closeTabOptions .scrollbutton-up,
#context_closeTabOptions .scrollbutton-down {
display: none !important;
}

5. Click File > Save as, type the filename as “userChrome.css”, choose ” All files” for Save as type, and save the file to the desktop.

6. Now copy the userChrome.css file and paste in the chrome folder we created in the profile folder in the third step.

7. Switch to Firefox, visit about:config, search and change the following pref to true

toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets

8. Close and relaunch the Firefox browser.

Ensure you’ve more than one tab open, right-click and hover over to notice “Close Tabs to the Right” and “Close other Tabs” in place of “Close Multiple Tabs” submenu.

Let Mozilla developers know you hate this change here.

UPDATE June 14, 2020: Mozilla confirmed they’re going with changes to the tab menu in Firefox 78. The company is preparing an article also to describe the reason for moving multiple tab options into new submenu.

Thanks, we decided to keep the change and as well as create an article on support.mozilla.org that explains the rationale behind the change and the benefits that Firefox will gain from making said change.

Related articles:

Firefox 64: Changes to Tab Context Menu

Firefox 69 to disable userChrome.css and userContent.css by default

Classic Theme Restorer Add-on Dev’s userChrome.CSS File to modify Firefox 57 Photon UI