How To Disable Click To Load Tabs In Firefox
Web browsers can automatically open the last tabs you were browsing. You have to change your browser’s start settings to enable this feature. If you’ve set your browser to always open a specific website i.e. your home page, or you’ve set it to always open a blank tab, the browser will not load tabs from your previous session. Both Firefox and Chrome support this session restore feature but Firefox adds something extra. If you’ve set Firefox to open tabs from your previous session, it will do so. It will, however, not load the tabs until you actually visit them. Firefox does this to prevent slow startup. It’s better to load just the one tab you want to use right away and postpone the others until you visit them. This feature is called click to load tabs. Here’s how you can disable click to load tabs in Firefox.
Turn On Session Restore
Click to load tabs works only if Firefox is set to open tabs from your last browsing session. To turn on this feature, go to Firefox’s setting by typing the following in the address bar;
about:preferences
On the General tab, there is an option called ‘When Firefox starts’. Open the drop-down menu next to this option and select ‘Show my windows and tabs from last time’.
Disable Click To Load
Now that you’ve enabled session restore, you need to disable click to load in Firefox. In the address bar, type the following;
about:config
Click the ‘I accept the risks’ button to proceed. On the About:config page, type the following in the search bar (not the same as the browser’s address bar);
browser.sessionstore.restore_on_demand
This is the preference that controls click to load. By default, it’s value is set to ‘True’. To disable click to load tabs in Firefox, you need only double-click this preference to change its value to ‘False’.
That’s all it takes. When you next launch Firefox, all the tabs from you previous session will be loaded. You will not have to visit them to begin loading. We should point out that this will slow down Firefox when you start it up. If you have a good internet connection, this might not be a big deal. For slower connections, disabling click to load is not the best idea.
This is all very lovely, except – it doesn’t work.