Prevent Zotero from auto-opening in Firefox 4 in tab mode
The Zotero (2.1 RC2) tab automatically opens every time I start Firefox 4. How can I prevent this?
I prefer to use tab mode, but I only want to have the tab open when I'm actually using Zotero. Most of the time I'm not.
I prefer to use tab mode, but I only want to have the tab open when I'm actually using Zotero. Most of the time I'm not.
I still think it's bad design. Apparently everyone else who uses my computer sooner or later ends up with a window with only the Zotero tab in it, staring at my paper collection.
I was very happy to be able to have Zotero as a tab, but it appears that since I switched to Firefox 4, that's impossible without additional unnecessary annoyances...
Nobody is forcing you to use tab mode as the default. As Simon noted above, you can have Zotero load in a pane and open it in a tab when you want to with a button click or keyboard shortcut.
Thanks for all the hard work
Roger
Would it be possible to add a checkbox to the Zotero Prefrences window? Underneath the "zotero", "Z", "none" selection for the Status bar icon, could there be a checkbox for "Separate tab present at startup"? When unchecked, it would cause the behavior Szabolcs, Roger, and I are looking for.
I think this should be more of a feature request for a "tab mode" which does not require Zotero to be an app-tab, that is, the possibility to open a tab containing
chrome://zotero/content/tab.xul
in different ways, e.g. from a bookmark or toolbar button.This would be consistent with how other xul pages in Firefox behave, for example
chrome://mozapps/content/extensions/extensions.xul
orchrome://browser/content/preferences/cookies.xul
Please note that bookmarking the Zotero tab is a natural action for those who choose to disable the "Tab on top" option in Fx4 and thus can always see the address bar. At the moment, reopening this bookmark has various effect ranging from opening Zotero to silently crashing Firefox.
As Zotero is already contained in a xul page, I believe most of the changes required would be restricted to the initialization code (which might already need some work), making this a feasable improvement.
But it seems like there are basically two requests here:
1) An option to have Zotero, when set to tab mode, not create an app tab on window open, and instead to have Zotero create an app tab if one doesn't exist when Zotero is opened via a button or keyboard shortcut.
2) The ability to open Zotero in a normal tab (including via a bookmark).
I also asked about this on another thread:
Would it be possible to create a shortcut for "Create New Item from Current Page" to work in a tab mode? Currently I have to click on shift/command/z to get to the Z tab, then command/shift/f to exit the tab mode, then click on the "Create New Item from Current Page" button. It would be nice if this could be done in one shortcut.
Is this possible?
The second is just thread hijacking...
The problem with making
chrome://zotero/content/tab.xul
open a Zotero tab is that you could potentially make very funky things happen, like have multiple Zotero tabs in a window, or a Zotero tab and a Zotero pane, or something else strange. In this case, it would be unclear which collection items would be saved into. I'm also not sure what the use case would be. f.figari, you are aware that if you customize the Firefox toolbar, there is a Zotero button to any toolbar you wish, right?
Also, part of my problem with the current app tab approach is that I get an app tab in every Firefox window I have open. Simon, with the app tab "tricks" that you're talking about, if I open Zotero in one Firefox window, then I open up a new Firefox window, would a Zotero app tab automatically appear in the new window? I'd rather have all new Firefox windows open without an app tab.
I really like Zotero's tab mode, so I don't want to give that up. However, I don't really want Zotero open as an app tab all the time. Sure nobody is "forcing" me to use the tab mode, but I find it mildly irritating that these two features (tab mode and auto open app tab) are being combined into one preference. I would definitely support this feature with one minor change. How about having Zotero create normal tab (if one is not already open) and then let the user pin it themselves if they want it to be an app tab? This way the user is given maximum flexibility.
Currently there are only two options for loading Zotero: browser pane and separate tab. It seems that the best solution would be to add a third option to load in an app tab. So in this new solution the browser pane option would behave the same as it does now, the separate tab option would cause Zotero in Fx4 to behave like the current version does in Fx3.6, and the app tab option would cause Zotero to behave like it currently does in Fx4. This way users can have more control over how they load Zotero.
At any rate, those who want to temporarily add the Fx3.6 tab behavior to Fx4 + Zotero 2.1.7 can unpack zotero.jar and comment out lines 59 and 295 of overlay.js. It will completely disable Zotero's app tab feature and cause it to behave as it did before the app tab stuff was added in. This is just a temporary fix which will need to be done every time a new version of Zotero is released. IMHO the user should be able to specify the desired behavior in the preferences though.
http://groups.google.com/group/zotero-dev
you should post the modified code somewhere suitable, like github or so.
Downside: if you want to use Zotero, you will need to enable it in the same way you disabled it, and then restart your firefox browser.
Hope this helps.