When I open a new Firefox window, any minimized Firefox windows are restored. This is annoying because I can't simply Alt-Tab to my previous window. (FF4 on Win7)
Got a new Windows 7 PC just as Firefox 4 came out. One annoying quirk is that any time I open a new Firefox window, it restores any minimized Firefox windows so I can't Alt-Tab back to my previous window -- instead I get one of the other Firefox window and I have to either minimized them all again or Alt-Tab past them to get back to my previous window. I don't see any other applications acting this way.
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Are you new to Windows 7? It sounds like you have Firefox pinned to the task bar and are trying to open a new window by clicking on it like you did in Windows XP. If that's the case, Windows 7 works different. You can pin programs to the task bar, and when you first click it, it launches the program. Clicking the icon again while the program is in focus will minimize it.
To open a new window if it's already running, middle click the icon or right click it for a context menu or within Firefox just hit CTRL+N.
By default all windows of the same program are combined to the one task bar icon. If multiple windows are open the icon will have a different look (it will look like multiple icons stacked on each other). To see the individual windows, just hover your mouse over the icon and it will popup a list of windows for that program and if you have Aero enabled you will see a preview of each window, then just click the one you want to switch to.
Thanks for the tips. I didn't know about the middle click. I did know the other methods.
As I said, any time I open a new Firefox window (doesn't matter how), all my existing minimized Firefox windows are restored and brought forward just behind the new window. So for instance if I click on a link in an email, Firefox opens the appropriate page in a new window but restores all my other Firefox windows under it so that Alt-Tab does not return me to the email but to one of the other Firefox windows instead.
Since several of the apps we use are web-based, I tend to keep a few windows open. I group related pages together as tabs, using separate windows for unrelated pages.
I'm having the same problem but with Windows XP. It seems any method used to open the new Firefox window causes all minimized windows to be restored.
Removing a couple of toolbars that had been installed by other software (I'd previously just disabled them), seems to have fixed it. I suppose I should have removed them one at a time so I could report which did the trick.
Too bad I can't actually mark the solution for this since I found it myself...
The Ask.com toolbar can cause this issue.