Firefox opens new tabs every time I open an attachment. How do i stop this?
Under the applications tab I have set it up that every PDF is to be opened with Acrobat, yet everytime I open a PDF attachment Firefox insists on opening a new tab. Furthermore, Microsoft Excel is NOT present in the list under the applications tab. Nothing I have found on the support pages seems to work. It's annoying as i open quite a few attachments everyday as part of my job and having to go thru and close out unwanted blank tabs is annoying. It wasn't doing that for the longest time, then it started. I looked on the support site for suggestions and tried several of them (refresh Firefox, make changes under Applications tab, delete mineTypes.rdf file etc) then it seemed to stop for a while. Now it's started back up again and won't stop. I am using Window 7 Professional, Service Pack 1
All Replies (3)
Usually if you click a link or button, and the site launches a PDF in a new tab, and Firefox recognizes that the content should open in an external viewer, Firefox will close the blank tab automatically. If you using Ctrl, or middle-click, or another method to direct the PDF to a new tab, Firefox might not close the blank tab automatically in that case. If you aren't doing that manually, do you have any add-ons that affect how Firefox works with tabs?
If all the usual Excel entries are missing from the Options/Applications list, then I recommend again renaming/removing mimeTypes.rdf so Firefox can rebuild the list from the Windows registry.
jscher2000: Well that's what it had been doing for years but then stopped even though I have not changed how I open attachments (clicking the link). I wouldn't begin to know what add-ons might be doing this because apparently I don't have any. I do have some plug-ins however they don't look like anything new.
I have removed the mimeTypes file so many times yet it always seems to keep re-appearing the next day or if I have to restart Firefox for some reason. In addition, even if I can see this file (help, troubleshooting, show folder) if I try searchuing for it under the start button it more often than not produces no results. Right now it's not there because I deleted it this morning but how would I go about getting Firefox to rebuild it from the windows registry?
Modified by Jringe01
Jringe01 said
I have removed the mimeTypes file so many times yet it always seems to keep re-appearing the next day or if I have to restart Firefox for some reason.
Oh, that's normal. If you remove mimeTypes.rdf, Firefox will rebuild it at the next startup. I don't know why Firefox would have trouble finding your Excel associations in the registry.
There are cases in which Firefox does not know how to open an Excel file, typically when the website is not sending one of the recognized content types (see attached screenshot). In that case, you may need to save the file first before opening it.
Regarding add-ons, if your Extensions list is blank, it's difficult to understand the source of the extra tab. Do you have this problem on a popular webmail site (e.g., Yahoo, Gmail, Outlook) or on one that we might not have much insight into?
