I installed FF 2.0 last night when I rebuilt my box and I’ve been struggling with the new tab bar. First, the close tab button is not to the right of the bar where I keep expecting it. I’ve grown pretty accustomed to quickly managing my tabs the way it was setup and I keep finding my self searching for the tab close button which now exists on each individual tab.

Rather than trying to learn the new layout, I set out in search of the fix. The first big hit was a thread that deteriorated into a UI design war. Then I found this slashdot comment that gave me the basic idea:

open firefox
type ‘about:config’ into the address bar
scroll down to ‘browser.tabs.closeButtons’ and set this value to 3.

Supposedly,

0: active tab close button
1: all tabs close buttons
2: no tab close buttons
3: tab close on right (old firefox style)

But I couldn’t see a difference in 0 and 1, specifically, all my tabs didn’t get close buttons. Maybe I have too many open, this page about the browser.tabs.tabClipWidth setting would indicate as much is true.

You can tune some of these things from the options gui if you install the tabbed preferences addon. But I still haven’t found an option to disable the tab sliders. Maybe it’s time to look for a multi-row tab addon.