How To Remove The New Tab (Plus) Button In Firefox 3.5

With the release of Firefox 3.5, comes some new features and some annoying ones.

One annoying feature is wasting un-necessary real estate to include a new tab button on the tab bar.

All the button does is add a new tab when clicked, which is really not needed since you already have three options to add another tab, with the easiest method by pressing CTRL+T on the keyboard (the other two ways are double clicking on an empty tab bar area or right clicking on the tab bar and selecting New Tab).

A fourth method is not needed (yet another reason why Firefox is bloated).

Fortunately Firefox is customizable and removing the tab button requires a simple fix.

Removing the tab button requires adding a line to the userChrome.css file in your Firefox profile folder.

• First you will need to navigate to your Firefox profile directory and look for the chrome folder.

On XP, navigate to: \Documents and Settings\[yourusername]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile.default]\chrome

On Vista and Windows 7, navigate to: \Users\[yourusername]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profile.default]\chrome

If you had previously customize Firefox, more than likely you have an exisitng userChrome.css file already. If not, just create an empty file named userChrome.css

• Next, open the file using Notepad and add the following line:

.tabs-newtab-button {display: none;}

NOTE: If you already had an exisitng file, then just add the line at the bottom of the file.

• When finished, save the file and close it.

• Then close and re-open Firefox.

If everything was done correctly, the tab button should now be gone from Firefox's tab bar.