[Firefox Tip] Disable Animation in Opening or Closing Tabs and Fix Unresponsive Tabs Problem

Recently I started facing a very irritating problem in Mozilla Firefox. I usually open lots of tabs in browser and when I was trying to close those tabs, Firefox was taking a few more seconds to close them and to switch to the next tab. Also the switch process was a little bit slugish, actually the animation used by the browser while closing the tabs was causing this irritating issue.

Mozilla Firefox shows a nice animation while opening new tabs or closing existing tabs and if you open multiple tabs in Firefox, the browser starts consuming more resources and when you try to close tabs, the browser starts lagging and takes time in closing tabs.

If you are also facing similar problem, you can fix this problem by disabling animation which is used by Firefox while opening / closing tabs. Even if you are not facing this issue, you can disable the animation to speed up Mozilla Firefox.

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So without wasting time, lets share the trick to disable animation in opening / closing tabs in Firefox:

1. Open Firefox and type about:config in the addressbar and press Enter. It’ll confirm, click on I’ll be careful, I promise! button.

Access_Mozilla_Firefox_About_Config.png

2. Now type animate in the Filter box and look for following boolean key:

browser.tabs.animate

3. The entry “browser.tabs.animate” would be set to true. Double-click on it or right-click on it and select “Toggle“. It’ll set its value to false.

4. Now whenever you open a new tab, you’ll not see the new animation and you’ll notice that now tabs opens or closes instantly without any delay caused by animation.

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New Working Method:

[Tip] Make Mozilla Firefox Faster by Disabling UI Animations

Published in: Mozilla Firefox, Troubleshooting Guides

About the author: Vishal Gupta (also known as VG) has been awarded with Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award. He holds Masters degree in Computer Applications (MCA). He has written several tech articles for popular newspapers and magazines and has also appeared in tech shows on various TV channels.

Comments

NOTE: Older comments have been removed to reduce database overhead.

  1. THANKS!

    I there was a box with a button that killed every single developer on the planet that builds pretty-before-useful things like this, i would duct-tape.it down

  2. Thank you!! My Firefox tabs kept freezing up and then I noticed an error message about a “new tab animation” being unresponsive. I had never even heard of it until then. Found this article and it stopped the issue in under a minute šŸ™‚ Thanks!

  3. I found that although close tab animation was eliminated
    Animation for creating new tab is still active
    Looking for some method to deactivate both open and close tab animation

  4. I’m using Firefox 34 on a Mac with Tab Mix Plus (multi-row option).

    Since upgrading to Firefox 29’s Australis interface, unloaded tabs ‘bounce’ on mouseƶver. The bouncing is so pronounced that it sometimes causes my cursor to mouseƶver a tab on another rowā€”and so it goes on.

    In about:config, I’ve tried disabling various animations but to no avail.

    Any suggestions?

    PS: It would be helpful if you would date your posts so readers can judge their likely relevance.

  5. Been looking for alternatives to Opera 12 for a long time. FF UI always felt extremely unresponsive, but this tweak made it much faster, thanks!

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