How to turn off tabs in Mozilla Thunderbird
Mozilla Thunderbird is my desktop email client of choice. It has been my primary go-to program for all things email for years and even though it is not very high up on Mozilla's priority list anymore, it is an excellent program for that.
When Mozilla developed Firefox and Thunderbird in sync, some features of Firefox found its way in to Thunderbird as well. This includes tabbed browsing among others.
Tabbed browsing enables you to open multiple emails in Thunderbird in tabs so that you can switch between them. I won't deny that this can be useful to some users, as you can open emails from different folders for instance and have access to them at the same time.
I always found the tabbed browsing feature not convincing enough though. In addition to that, I did encounter situations where Thunderbird would not restore the tabs on start which meant that I had to open all emails again to regain access to them.
If you don't like tabs or don't use them, you can turn the feature off easily in the email client.
Turn off tabs in Thunderbird
Here is what you need to do to disable tabs in the email client:
- Click on Tools > Options in the menu bar at the top of the program window.
- Switch to Advanced > Reading & Display in the options window.
- There you find "open messages in" with the default option "a new tab" selected.
- Switch that either to "a new message window" or " an existing message window".
- Click ok.
The difference between the two options is the following one: if you select a new message window, Thunderbird will spawn a new window whenever you double-click on an email. If you select an existing message window instead, it will limit messages to a single window.
Hide Tabs
If you disable tabs in Thunderbird, a single tab is still displayed in the interface taking up space.
This can be changed as well to free up room in the interface:
- Select Tools > Options again from the menu.
- Switch to Advanced > General this time and click on Config Editor there.
- Confirm you will be careful if the warning message appears.
- Search for mail.tabs.autoHide and double-click the entry to set it to true.
- Close the window.
Doing so hides the remaining tab in the Thunderbird interface moving all other interface elements up in the process.
Now You: Do you work with tabs in Thunderbird?
You said that Outlook isn’t your main email client, so which is your main one?
I think its thunderbird
It is Mozilla Thunderbird.
Awesome! This actually solved my problem… what a stupid bug.
If this is the same bug that I’ve encountered, there may be another fix: (1) hover over open Outlook item in Taskbar, cursor up to hover over Outlook window item, and right-click; (2) this should give you Restore / Move / Size / Minimize / Maximize — choose Move or Size; (3) use your cursor keys, going arbitrarily N/S/E/W, to try to move or size the Outlook window back into view. Basically, the app behaves as though it were open in a 0x0 window, or at a location that’s offscreen, and this will frequently work to resize and/or move the window. Don’t forget to close while resized/moved, so that Outlook remembers the size/position for next time.
THANK YOU Claude!!! I could get the main window to launch but could not get any other message window to show on the desktop. You are my hero!!!!
Solved my issue! 6 years later and this is still problem…
Fantastic. Thank you. Size did the trick.
This solved my Outlook problem, too. Thank you. :)
Thank you so much, this started happening to me today and was causing big problems. You are a life saver, I hope I can help you in some way some day.
You are a god – thank you!
thanks a lot…. work like charm.. :-)
Yah…thanks Claude. I’ve been having the same problem and tried all the suggestions…your solution was the answer. It had resized itself to a 0/0 box. Cheers
Excellent post. This had me baffled even trying to accurately describe the problem. This fixed it for me.
Thank you
Thanks a lot for the article. Don’t know why it happenend, don’t know how it got fixed, but it was really annoying and now it works :-)
Thanks a lot. I was facing this issue from past 3 week. I tried everything but no resolution. The issue was happening intermittently and mainly when I was changing the display of screen ( as i use 2 monitors). The only option i had was to do system restore. But thanks to you.
I’ve been tried to sole this problem for 12hours. Your comment about changing the display of screen helped me a lot!! Thanks!!
Thank you…don’t know why this happened but your instructions helped me fix it. Running Windows 10 and office pro 2007
Great tip! Thanks!
Worked for me, too – thank you!!!
It’s Worked for me, too
thank you very much!
I had a similar issue with Outlook 2013 on Windows 10 and this helped me to fix it. Thank you very much!
Thank you so much. Solved!
Considering you published this in 2012, incredible not been debugged by Microsoft.
Thank you again. M
This problem was faced by only one user logging to TS 2008 r2 using outlook 2010.The issue was resolved.
Thanks.
Great tip. Thank you!!!! If it helps, I had to use the Control Key and the arrow keys at the same time to bring my window back into view. Worked like a charm.
Thank you, this worked !!!!
Man, you are a fucking god. Thanks a lot, what an annoying bug!!
Awesome, this post solved the issue. Many thanks!