Do you hate Firefox 57, or more specifically the loss of the Classic Theme Restorer and/or Tab Mix Plus extensions?

Firefox has been pushing out Firefox 57, and a lot of people really hate the fact that their “legacy” extensions don’t work anymore. Two that I see frequently mentioned as especially missed are Classic Theme Restorer and Tab Mix Plus.

Now, you should be aware that there is an alternative to Firefox called Waterfox, which can be downloaded here. It will let you continue to use your Firefox “legacy” extensions, but not much is known about whether Waterfox is secure or to what degree. I had not even heard of it until about a week ago, but then mentions started popping up with people saying it was a viable alternative to Firefox. The thing you need to keep in mind is that one of the reasons support for the “legacy” extensions was dropped was because the Firefox developers felt they could make Firefox more secure. So I am not telling you which browser to use, but just letting you know the alternative exists.

But with that said, there are various things you can use to emulate at least some of the functionality of the missing legacy addons. Here are a few links that may prove helpful:

EMULATING CLASSIC THEME RESTORER:

This project called ‘Classic’ css tweaks for Firefox 57+ v1.3.0 will allow you to configure several parts of the user interface, including putting tabs down below the address and bookmarks bars where they belong (note that if ALL you want to do is move the tabs below the the other bars, the third example on this page may be sufficient). However it’s definitely not as easy to install or use as using Classic Theme Restorer was, and you can’t completely emulate the CTR functionality. Also, whoever created this seems to be in love with square corners on tabs – if you’d rather have rounded corners, have a look at Photon Australis or better yet, this modified version on Reddit. Finally, don’t forget that you can go to the Firefox Themes page and select a theme that makes your tabs more readable.

DEALING WITH TABS

Tab Mix Plus had large number of things it could do, and most of them will be hard to emulate any other way. But here are a few things that may save your sanity when dealing with tabs.

Opening bookmarks in a new tab: It’s now a Firefox preference (browser.tabs.loadBookmarksInTabs) but you will probably need to create it manually. This page tells you how.

Open searches in a new tab: Same as the previous item, but the setting is browser.search.openintab – set it to true.

Opening links in a new tab: Use the Open Link with New Tab addon, and be sure to set the preferences the way you want them.

The #1 most missed thing from Tab Mix Plus: How to type or paste an address into the address bar and have it by default open in a new tab rather than whatever tab you’re currently using. Although there is no really good way to do this in Firefox 57, the New Tab from Location Bar addon seems to do it, albeit a bit clumsily. But given the limitations imposed on addon developers by Firefox 57, you should probably think of this addon in the way you would think of a dancing bear. You don’t critique how well the bear dances; instead you are astonished that it is able to dance at all! There is a related discussion in this Firefox bug report.

Reopening a tab you accidentally closed: You can do this from the dropdown near the right edge of the tab bar but if you have trouble remembering that, or are using custom css that causes the dropdown to disapper, or want to be able to pick recently closed tabs from a list, try the Undo Close Tab Button addon.

If you don’t like the page that is shown when you open a new tab, you can either click the gear icon in the upper right hand corner of the page to change it, or use the New Tab Override (WebExtension) addon.

Finally, if you are like me and tend to keep many tabs open, you might want to see multiple rows of tabs rather than a single row. Tab Mix Plus gave you a lot of control over this, and unfortunately I hadn’t found anything that came close until I stumbled across this Reddit thread. But before you go and use that, you may want to change the line that begins with “max-width: none” and change the word “none” to the same value that’s in the “min-width:” line just above. So, if you haven’t changed the min-width, you should make the max-width 100px, otherwise it’s going to look kind of goofy IMHO. However, if you ordinarily have only one row of tabs, and overflow to a second row only occasionally, you may want to set the max-width value to something higher (or leave it at “none”), so that more of the labels on the tabs will display.

How to type or paste an address into the address bar and have it by default open in a new tab rather than whatever tab you’re currently using.

KNOW OF ANY OTHER FIREFOX 57 TWEAKS?

Since Firefox 57 is so new, I expect we’ll see more tweaks as days go by, and if I find any good ones that would complement the ones above, I’ll add them to this page. Please leave a comment if you know of any (but no spam, please!).