The background of the tab-strip is now part of the "titlebar" area and double-click will maximize or "restore" the window.

If you don't like the Tab "+" button showing all the time, you can use {Ctrl + N} to open a new Tab or use {Alt + F} and then hit T.

No kidding really? LOL we All figured that out by ourselves. This is the fix we are asking abut how to get the double click to work again. It is the cleanest and quickest way to open a new tab. Why on earth would the programmers take the least obtrusive, quickest, and easiest way to open a new tab and eliminate it on purpose? Simple question was how do we re-enable it...

totally agree.. very annoying .. and no idea why replacing a perfectly functional capability with something where either I have to click an icon or do some silly (and very old school) Ctrl-Letter combination is completely and utterly stupid. Bring back what we had.

I discovered this by chance: open Customize and on lower bottom left there is a button to restore the Title Bar; when restored the "Tab Bar" becomes the Tab Bar again and double-clicking works again. However, this seems to only to be working on Windows XP as I just tried this on my Windows 7 netbook and double-clicking does (literally) "nothing" there, alas.

Note too I have Tab Mix Plus installed on both computers, in case this also relevant.

Think you'll agree that this is odd but when I upgraded my Firefox browser on my home machine -- also running Win7 Enterprise 64 bit -- I notice that every time I'd open a new tab .. there was a little shadow tab that would appear next to it.. and that tab was for making a new tab by simply clikcing on it. What's odd is that I'm not seeing that on this machine (my office machine) which is also running Win7-Enterprise 64 bit.. Which makes me wonder is there some tab control setting I need to set? I've tried removing the new tab button from the menu bar to see if that would fix things.. but no joy. Any ideas?

UPDATE -- in essence -- what I'm seeing at home is the behavior we know and love .. a little new tab automatically appearing at the end of all our current tabs .. so my question is "what happened to the new tab at the end of the current tabs .. and why does it appear in some installs of Firefox and not in others even tho they are NOMINALLY the same version of Firefox??"

Better solution if you have Tab Mix Plus installed (Restoring the Title Bar is unnecessary).

Open Tab Mix Plus Options.

Go To Mouse: Mouse Clicking Tab: Double Click sub-tab

Check the box for "on the tabbar" if unchecked, select "open new tab" if not already selected. (I believe these are the default choices)

Then below there's a check-box† and check it

† "Prevent double click on the Tab-bar from changing window size..."

Now double-clicking on the tab-bar will open a new tab as before. It works on both my computers: Windows XP and Windows 7.

Posted to MozillaZine about this issue and got the answer which I've verified works .. right click on the menu bar .. click on and drag the icon for adding a tab and place it right next to the last of your active tabs. In fact, here is the exact posting I got:

Posted Wed Apr 30, 2014 1:24 pm What happens if you drag the icon from the menu bar to the space adjacent to the tab row? For me that produces the '+' tab. I think you have to choose one or the other.

Works like a charm!

Wow, that was a pain to figure out. Since the update to Australis, when double clicking the tab-bar area I was getting the annoying mixture of pages in a new tab (about:newtab) instead of a plain old google search page (about:home). Ctrl-T was working fine, but not the double click method.

I wondered if it was TabMixPlus, Tree Tabs or Classic Theme Restorer causing the problem/change but I guess it's Australis Tab-bar changes!!!.

The above tip for TabMixPlus (Thanks kDG001) worked for me but only after clicking the suggested extra box "Prevent double click on tab-bar from changing window size..." - God knows what that does normally (I suppose it's a new setting for Australis Tab-bar changes) or why Australis changed the previous behaviour.

I am not liking Australis (v29), what's the point of making it simple and like Chrome? Firefox's strength was it's configurability, now a lot of that seems lost/complicated while attempting to make it appeal to basic users.

Same problem here. Don't wish to use yet another add-on to fix such a simple feature which was available previously.

Let's see FF 29.01 to bring back this most basic and important feature!!!

FIXED!!! By playing around with Customization, I enabled the "Title Bar" which appears as a button on the bottom left.

I am now able to double-click directly to the right of an open Tab to create a new tab.

I tired enabling the Title bar and I still can not get it to open a new tab. At least it stopped changing the window mode by clicking.

Any ideas?

Dragging the + icon lets you click it to open a new tab but still doesn't allow you to double click to get a new tab. Wow seems like some microsoft people are working for mozilla.

I don't think the title bar business has had anything to do with it for me (I may be mistaken) but I have have found that there's quite a strong interplay between the various brilliant Add-ons that offer these features in themselves.

For me, almost definitely Tab Mix Plus and I think Tree Style Tab offer these abilities for a new tab, then FF itself and possibly one or two other extensions. My advice being to find the options in all of them and decide which one to use and perhaps stop them all fighting to override each other, or work out which one is actually dominating the last choice of what to actually do.

It's not easy, I have pretty much got things back to how things were before the whole Australis mess/disaster, but still a few things don't quite work as they used to such as the position of new tabs, either at the end of the list of tabs or after the current tab seems to evade me. I feel I'm one or two tick-box settings away from the holy-grail of configurations, but that particular permutation evades me so far.

To this date, I still cannot forgive the whole set of problems given to us by the simplified "customisable"- "but isn't" interface of Australis. All it's done is completely muck up people's ways of working and if I'd wanted to use a browser like the default Australis, then I would have used (and do on occasions) Chrome or Opera which do it all in that simple baby-toy stuff way already.

Firefox as was, if they are not going to make it best and unique again, may it R.I.P.

" Helpful Reply

Better solution if you have Tab Mix Plus installed (Restoring the Title Bar is unnecessary).

Open Tab Mix Plus Options.

Go To Mouse: Mouse Clicking Tab: Double Click sub-tab

Check the box for "on the tabbar" if unchecked, select "open new tab" if not already selected. (I believe these are the default choices)

Then below there's a check-box† and check it

† "Prevent double click on the Tab-bar from changing window size..."

Now double-clicking on the tab-bar will open a new tab as before. It works on both my computers: Windows XP and Windows 7.

Modified April 30, 2014 10:10:12 AM PDT by kDG001"

Ah geez, long time lurker, but boy V29 has had me searching for many of the same issues as others. Didn't realize how much muscle memory was there for the past features that were lost.

In the end the above is great, works for me. I had Tab Mix Plus already. But wasn't working.

I had the first choices enable for the double mouse clicking. And had added the title bar to stopped the window from resizing, but still couldn't get new tabs to open with the double click.... I missed the  : † "Prevent double click on the Tab-bar from changing window size...

Thank you for your post...

Firefox has removed this feature of double click. they have made it possible by middleclick. it means on the empty space on the tab bar, if you middleclick(mouse scroll wheel) it will open a new tab. it is possible now with just one click rather than two.

So, solving a problem by creating yet another problem. Middleclicking the Tabbar already has a function: restoring a previously closed tab.

Perhaps this has been a Tab Mix Plus feature -- I've been using Tab Mix Plus with Firefox since I began using Firefox 1.0 [2004]. Both these actions, doubleclick to open a new tab and middleclick to restore a tab are quite automatic (as bkny puts it: muscle memory, for sure) after all these years!

funny how FF became soo loved and used by standing out and being different, now with V29 + , we are lossing features because of "standardization" and "complying" .

At least due to talents of the users writing add-ons, we can still mold FF to what we are use to. But I'm waiting for when a FF update some how squeezes out such mods via add-ons. Chrome - can't move the tang tab bar at all, can't find any add ons.