How to auto-shrink Firefox tabs like Chrome

I’m a huge fan of Rust and prefer to see two products/companies competing in any product or market, so I was super excited to download Firefox 57.

It’s my daily driver and generally I’m happy with it. My main bugbear was not being able to have many tabs open before it started scrolling, which I’m accustomed to from Google Chrome.

The Google Chrome “bajillion tabs” approach

Firefox starts scrolling after about 15 tabs

Turns out, this is actually configurable, but not in an obvious place. Here are the steps:

• Type about:config in the address bar
• Accept the warning
• Enter tabMinWidth to search for setting
• Double-click that line
• Enter a small value, such as 15
• Voila! More tabs

It seems there’s a hardcoded minimum it won’t go below, so it’s not as ‘tight’ as Chrome, but it’s much better. Enjoy.

Enjoy more tabs!